John Dowland died 400 years ago this twelve months, and we’ll be fortunate certainly if there are many assorted tributes as charming as this one from the soprano Ruby Hughes, lutenist Jonas Nordberg and viola da gamba participant Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann. The song is by no formulation all Dowland – essentially, the recording takes its title from a song by Purcell, and one amongst its most memorable tracks is a titillating version of the Corpus Christi Carol as region by Britten – nonetheless the entire lot is steeped in the palatable Elizabethan depression that Dowland distilled so very successfully.

Hughes’s suppose retains a natural quality, for all its refinement, which has been skilfully captured – the recording is shut enough for her so as to be refined and confiding, nonetheless there’s soundless a sense of relate all around the sound. She’s extra vocally demonstrative than some, colouring every phrase personally: when in Dowland’s Drift, My Tears she sings of “apprehension, and effort, and effort”, we’re left in absolute self assurance that these are three assorted nonetheless equally grisly feelings. And but she, Nordberg and Brinkmann retain all this in balance, retaining a persuasive sense of line and point of curiosity so as that the expressivity registers no longer as indulgence nonetheless as communication. This is factual as evident in the song by Dowland’s contemporaries and in Purcell as it is in the four unusual or contemporary compositions per Shakespeare’s song lyrics at the discontinue, by Deborah Pritchard, Errollyn Wallen and Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

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