Dowland: First and Second Bookes of Songs.
Paul Agnew, tenor; Christopher Wilson, lute.
Metronome [catalog number not provided]. Recorded [dates and venue not provided]. CD.
Dowland’s dark genius has never been easy to classify. He was the most celebrated lutenist in Europe—Elizabeth I kept him on salary, Christian IV of Denmark paid him extravagantly—and yet something in him resisted comfort, kept circling back to grief and shadow. The lute song as he shaped it isn’t quite chamber music, isn’t quite theater. It sits in its own peculiar emotional weather.
Paul Agnew brings a genuine tenor voice to these selections from the First and Second Bookes of Songs, and that alone distinguishes this Metronome disc from much of the competition. The countertenor has dominated this repertoire for decades now—Alfred Deller cast a long shadow—and there’s something almost revelatory about hearing “Flow my teares” sung by a voice that doesn’t have to reach up to the melody but simply inhabits it. Agnew’s timbre is clear, slightly grainy at the edges, and he phrases with a kind of inward restraint that suits Dowland’s peculiar brand of lamentation. The descending bass line that underpins “Flow my teares“—one of the most famous ostinatos in all of early music—finds its natural counterpart in Agnew’s unhurried, almost meditative delivery.
Christopher Wilson’s lute playing is, quite simply, first-rate. His ornamentation is tasteful without being fussy, his rhythmic sense supple enough to breathe with the singer rather than merely accompany him. Listen to “I saw my Lady weepe“—the way Wilson shapes the inner voices, the slight lingering on the diminished intervals. That’s not just competent playing. That’s musicianship.
Still. There are moments where Agnew’s vibrato thickens uncomfortably—“Can she excuse my wronges” being the most conspicuous case—and what ought to feel like expressive inflection tips toward something almost tremulous, unsteady. It doesn’t ruin the song, but it nags.
The program itself is generous in its way: sixteen songs, nearly an hour, drawing from what are arguably Dowland’s two finest collections. “Come again: sweet love doth now invite” gets a performance of considerable warmth; the three-part “Tymes eldest sonne” sequence—old age, resignation, the final Nunc dimittis—unfolds with genuine cumulative weight. “Fine knacks for Ladies,” that odd little street-vendor’s song that Dowland dropped into his otherwise melancholy Second Book like a wink, has real charm here.
What’s missing is the complete picture—the full Books rather than a selection—but that’s a limitation of the format, not a failure of the performers. What Agnew and Wilson have made here is intimate, serious, and worth returning to. Decisive recommendation.
