**Music at the Court of Charles I**
Paul Agnew, tenor; Christopher Wilson, lute and theorbo; Concordia; Mark Levy, conductor.
Metronome MET CD 1038. Format, 61:00.
This disc emerged from a National Gallery exhibition devoted to Orazio Gentileschi, court painter to Charles I—one of those happy accidents where visual and musical curatorship briefly aligned. The repertoire spans anonymous Donne settings, William Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, and the obscure Richard Sumarte. Not a complete survey, then. But thoughtful.
The Donne settings reveal how quickly the poet’s verses entered musical circulation after he became Dean of St. Paul‘s in 1625. These composers—some we can’t even name—seized upon his metaphysical conceits with genuine appetite. Paul Agnew brings his characteristic intelligence to bear here, though I confess he sometimes over-colors where plainness might serve. In “So, so break off this late lamenting kiss” he whispers “ghost” with such hushed intensity that the word nearly vanishes into breath. Effective, yes—but one wonders if Caroline singers would have recognized such studied intimacy. Still, his grasp of the poems’ architecture is secure.
William Corkine’s “Tis true, tis day, what though it be?” catches Agnew in better form. The setting demands vocal athleticism, leaping from high to low register, and here the tenor’s flexibility pays dividends. You can hear him relishing the poem’s wit, the lovers’ complaint against daybreak rendered with a kind of rueful charm. This is period interpretation at its most persuasive—not because it’s “authentic” (whatever that means) but because it’s alive.
The Lawes Consort set in C Minor takes Dowland’s Lachrimae as its point of departure but transforms the material with Caroline harmonic boldness. Concordia plays with good ensemble balance, though their tuning occasionally drifts in the inner voices—nothing catastrophic, just the sort of thing you notice in repeated listening. Mark Levy’s direction favors steady tempos over rhetorical flexibility; I’d have welcomed more breathing space in the slower movements.
Nicholas Lanier, first Master of the King’s Musick, dominates the disc’s second half. His Italian sojourn left clear traces in these songs, particularly “Amorosa pargoletta,” where Agnew rolls his r’s with such theatrical relish you half-expect him to produce a lute himself. Was this song really addressed to Artemisia Gentileschi, as the notes suggest? The documentary evidence is thin. But the music’s Italianate swagger is undeniable.
“No more shall meads be deck’d with flowers” employs a chaconne bass—that descending ground so beloved of seventeenth-century composers—to support an elaborate lament. Here Agnew’s diction serves him beautifully; you catch every syllable without strain, which matters in a poem this dense with imagery. Christopher Wilson’s theorbo provides a dark, woody foundation, his right-hand articulation crisp without being mannered.
Wilson deserves more than passing mention. His solo interludes reveal a player who understands how these instruments actually breathed in their own time—the slight unevenness of plucked attacks, the way a bass course can bloom when you give it space. Modern lute playing sometimes sounds too clean, too guitaristic. Wilson avoids that trap.
The disc’s curiosity is Richard Sumarte’s “Lachrimae,” a rare vocal setting from a composer who left almost no trace in the historical record. We know he flourished around 1630; beyond that, silence. The piece itself is competent rather than inspired, but it fills out our picture of Caroline musical life—all those minor figures orbiting the court, producing workmanlike settings for private entertainment.
My complaints are minor. The recorded sound places Agnew too close to the microphone; you hear every breath, every lip smack. Some listeners enjoy such proximity. I find it distracting. And Metronome’s decision to omit texts is baffling—yes, Agnew’s diction is superb, but Donne’s poetry rewards reading as well as hearing.
The larger question is whether this repertoire justifies repeated listening beyond its historical interest. I think it does, though not uniformly. The best Donne settings possess genuine musical invention, not merely competent text setting. Lanier’s Italian songs crackle with theatrical energy. The Lawes consort music rewards attention even from listeners who couldn’t care less about Caroline politics.
This is a valuable disc, then—well performed, intelligently programmed, filling gaps in our knowledge of early seventeenth-century English music. Not quite indispensable, perhaps. But considerably more than a curiosity.
