Dowland Lute Songs – Ruby Hughes

There is a moment near the end of “Flow My Tears” on this disc where Ruby Hughes reduces her voice to something barely above a breath — and the silence that follows feels earned, not manufactured. That is the difference between a singer who understands Dowland and one who merely performs him.

The lute song repertoire is treacherous in its apparent simplicity. These pieces, written for intimate domestic settings in Elizabethan and Jacobean England — a parlor, a great hall after supper, a few friends gathered around a single candle — demand a kind of expressive honesty that the concert hall almost inevitably distorts. Dowland himself was a complicated figure: the most celebrated lutenist in Europe, court artist to Christian IV of Denmark, perpetually angling for a position at the English court he could never quite secure, and nursing that disappointment into some of the most exquisitely melancholic music ever written. His famous pun on his own name — semper Dowland semper dolens, always Dowland always doleful — was only half a joke.

Hughes understands all of this instinctively, or at least she makes you believe she does.

“Come Away, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite” opens with a tempo so spacious it might alarm a listener expecting something more sprightly — the song is, after all, an invitation, and invitations can have urgency. But Hughes and lutenist Jonas Nordberg find another logic entirely. The rising phrases that build through each verse accumulate genuine excitement precisely because they’ve been given room to breathe, and by the third verse the effect is almost physical. Nordberg’s short flourishes between stanzas are understated, decorative without being merely ornamental — a distinction that matters more than it sounds.

The ornamentation throughout is subtle. No histrionic trills, no showing off. Just the quiet evidence of a singer who has thought hard about where a small embellishment illuminates rather than decorates.

“Time Stands Still” — probably the most famous of all the First Booke songs — confirms what the opener had suggested: Hughes is going to take her time. Deliberately. Unfashionably. Some listeners may initially resist the tempo, but I doubt many will by the end.

Three songs by Robert Johnson make for a fascinating detour. Johnson is undervalued, perpetually overshadowed by Dowland, and it’s worth remembering that he held the position of lutenist to the King’s Men — Shakespeare’s company — and that Shakespeare himself apparently sanctioned Johnson’s settings of the Ariel songs from The Tempest. “Full Fathom Five” is one of the strangest and most luminous things in the entire repertoire, that slow chromatic descent evoking transformation, dissolution, sea-change. Hughes’s treatment of the syllables “ding-dong bell” is — there is no better word — delicious: playful without being arch, humanizing the spirit Ariel without quite domesticating him.

Then there is John Danyel, who deserves far more attention than he gets. His single published collection, Songs for the Lute, Viol and Voice of 1606, is virtually his entire surviving output, and the fact that he never produced a second volume remains one of the minor mysteries of the period. “Grief Keep Within” is in truth three linked songs, a memorial cycle for the unidentified “Mrs. M. E.” — her husband dead, her grief made permanent and strange by Danyel’s extraordinary harmonic language. The chromaticism here anticipates things that won’t become standard practice for another century; the syncopations feel wrenched, effortful, as if grief itself is disrupting the natural pulse of the music. Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann’s viola da gamba adds a low gravity to the texture that the lute alone could not provide — there is a darkness in that instrument’s lower register that perfectly mirrors the subject matter.

Hughes works the word “pine” as if she is discovering its full weight for the first time. Fret. Pine. The music makes you feel both.

Competing recordings of this repertoire are plentiful — Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley set the standard for a generation, Julianne Baird brought her own lustrous tone to Dowland, and more recently Carolyn Sampson has navigated this territory with great intelligence. Hughes does not displace them. She adds to them. Her voice has a quality — warm but never blowsy, precise but never cold — that serves this music especially well, and her willingness to sing at the very edge of audibility without losing line or pitch is a technical achievement that deserves plain acknowledgment.

The disc venue, a Swedish church, might seem an odd choice for music this intimate, but the acoustic is dry enough to preserve the conversational quality these songs require while adding just enough resonance to prevent the sound from feeling anechoic. BIS, as usual, has done the engineering beautifully.

This is serious, considered, occasionally daring work — a recital that asks for real attention and rewards it fully.