O Sweet Love: Songs of Byrd & Dowland
The consort song is among the most rewarding of Elizabethan musical genres. In it we experience the pleasure of listening to a voice as part of a broader musical texture, the singer blending into the polyphonic weave created by the four viol players. We also enjoy the medium itself as something wonderfully sturdy and flexible, 'apt', in the period meaning of the word, for court entertainments, church services or amateur home music-making. This was a form which the great Tudor and Jacobean composers such as Thomas Morley and Orlando Gibbons delighted to explore to its fullest, but the real virtuoso in the field was William Byrd in collections such as the Psalmes, Sonets and Songs of 1588. Byrd's gift for moulding and expanding a singable voice line 'framed', as he put it 'to the life of the words' is matched by the supple authority of his counterpoint, a learning which manages simultaneously to flatter the singer.In the case of the young Canadian countertenor Daniel Taylor it doesn't really need to. The programme on this disc presents a mixture of Byrd consort songs, Dowland lute songs and instrumental pieces by both composers played by lutenist Stephen Stubbs with Susie Napper and Margaret Little on violas da gamba. This collection is as good as any in introducing those unfamiliar with Elizabethan art music to its skilful fusion of contrapuntal techniques with folk melody, popular tunes and dance rhythms. It is hard to imagine a better demonstration of the ways in which a period style can come alive in hands gifted with a genuine sense of its expressive vitality and sophistication.Taylor's voice – colourful, potent and keenly focused – is an ideal advocate for these pieces. In the disc's more sombre moments, such as the great Byrd laments for Thomas Tallis and Sir Philip Sidney, the singer creates an appropriate rhetorical climax to these songs without ever losing sight of the inherent beauty in their ensemble structure. The Dowland numbers, on the other hand, are treated with a stunning vocal agility which allows each significant word of the text its due impact while sustaining suitable rhythmic crispness. Listen to Shall I strive or Come again and virtuosity of this kind almost makes you feel that you're catching the authentic tones of intimate erotic conversation from Shakespeare's age.Some listeners may quibble with the decision to divide the instrumental lines between a brace of gambas rather than allotting a player to each of the four parts. Les Voix Humaines, however, aren't called this for nothing, adept as they are in exploiting the quasi-vocal qualities – what one Jacobean poet memorably called 'the grumbling cat-lines' – of their instruments. There's a humorously galumphing account of The Carman's Whistle, while Tregian's Ground shows Byrd at his most absorbingly cerebral. As for Stephen Stubbs's lute, thank goodness for a player who, instead of apologetically picking and scratching in the background, makes us wake up and take notice. In the end, though, this is Daniel Taylor's show, a genuinely exciting engagement by a countertenor of obviously stellar radiance with music for whose subtler shadings he has an infallible grasp.Jonathan B. Keates--From International Record Review - subscribe now