> You say that the lute playing is below standard for Dowland lute songs? > What do you mean? Is there such a thing? Would you give me an example?
Accompanying Dowland is to move with the text. Forward, hold a litltle, emphasis here, crunching chords on crunching words, purely instrumental melodic interest in the middle voices to slow things down or speed things up, hanging dissonant bass note on E-flat resolving half a bar later in a D to give relaxation with the text, alternating warm sound with harsh sound where appropriate with the text. Everything you do in a great song like In Darkness Let Me Dwell to help the emotions of the text come across. It's on the Sting cd too, you can hear a bit on track 23 of the examples. They do much of what I describe, it's quite exiting actually, but I find the sound horrible: thin and scraping. I cannot get emotionally involved, it's repelling. Maybe in the end that is what I don't like: the sound of lute as well as voice. The lute player is musical and does good things, but not good enough. Pity, missed opportunity. As Paul said, hopefully someone else will try his hand at this repertoire with a poppy aproach. Listen to Jacob Herringman for a different Dowland song accompanist. And for different vowels, too, by the way. They use period pronunctiation. (Treasures from my Mind - Virelai - Virgin Veritas). David To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
