English Lute Duets
Catalog Number: BIS267
An intimate portrait of Elizabethan duet playing—by turns brilliant, playful and poised—where dance-born grounds blossom into counterpoint, variations and expressive dissonances, letting two lutes converse with elegance and fire.
English Lute Duets
This album traces the art of the English lute duet from its sociable, pedagogy-tinged beginnings to a refined concert idiom. Early treble–ground pieces, spun over Italianate passamezzo and other recurring basses, reveal dancers’ steps transformed into fantasia and flourish, the upper part flowering through increasingly intricate variations while the ground anchors the pulse. In Ferrabosco’s noble Spanish Pavan the rhetoric rises to a poignant clash before a poised close; Johnson expands the model with ballad-based cycles whose range sweeps from highest fret to lowest string, culminating in the bravura arc of The New Hunt is Up. Around 1590 the repertoire embraces “equal” duets, sharing melody and accompaniment in pavan, galliard and later almain forms—music that balances craft with the sheer pleasure of music-making together. Danyel’s Passingmeasures Galliard pushes color and texture, and Robinson’s Fantasy exploits true contrapuntal interplay, while Dowland appears in miniature—an obbligato over a well-known tune and a tender “Fortune my foe”—reminding us how intimately these pieces sing. Across styles and decades, the dialogue of two lutes feels timelessly fresh.
Published date
1985-01-31
Number of discs
1
Channels
stereo:16:2.0
Made in Sweden since 1999. In collaboration with Textalk.
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