John Dowland : The Art of Melancholy

   in Early Music Today (Jun, 2014)
Roger Savage’s excellent liner notes to this disc are a delightful read; somewhat tongue-in-cheek at times, he seems to be decidedly in favour of a reimagining of Dowland as a man and a composer of many facets beyond the one-side melancholic posturing so often attributed to him. Iestyn Davies’s renderings of the songs illustrate this thinking perfectly, flirting with lightness and wonder (‘Come away, come sweet love’), wit (‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find’) and steely resignation (‘Come, heavy sleep’) as well as the masterly control of darkened timbre (‘In darkness let me dwell’) one would anticipate. The range of colour afforded to the songs by Davies yields a recital …