Review of Cambridge Early Music performing Time Stands Still: Songs of John Dowland and his Contemporaries
The distinctive soft tones of the lute in the hands of one of the world’s renowned masters of the instrument was prelude to yet another of Cambridge Early Music’s concert gems at St Catharine’s College Chapel (7 Feb).
It’s not known if John Dowland wrote his own texts, but the received wisdom is that there is a high probability he did so. His musical settings and arrangements of selected poems were superbly performed by celebrated lutenist Peter Croton appearing with the young vocal consort L’Isola.
The opening poem, ‘Time Stands Still’, had lent its title to the concert and is typical of many contemporary Renaissance poems striving to give expression to the indescribable. Music can often provide unmediated contributions of its own, with perhaps a mysterious sense of time standing still as we listen to it.
Renaissance poets loved to play with what were called ‘conceits’, i.e. ‘concepts’. ’Time Stands Still’ makes good use of textual inventions which are contrived to present us with difficulties as we strive to realize them. So, for example the poet’s mistress holds his gaze in such a way as to cancel time, something we all share and know to be impossible to cancel.
All-powerful Cupid who blinds lovers (‘love is blind’) is himself blinded by the eyes of this woman and is reduced to a powerless, disoriented and rather ludicrous figure hovering up and down; while ‘fortune’, before whom we are all powerless, itself lies ‘conqered at her feet’.
While we struggle with these conceits the overall effect is so to apotheosize the mistress as to remove her entirely from the natural order of things as we commonly understand it.
Characteristic of many contemporary poems, too, and the basis of Dowland’s peculiar melancholy is often the unattainability of the lady in question, the language used of the poet-lover’s quest subtly concealing a highly charged sexuality in his pursuit of her.
In Andrew Marvell’s well-known ‘invitation’ ‘To his coy mistress’ the poet ‘reasonably’ argues the comparatively brief amount of time both he, and his would-be love, are allotted, reminding her that the grave’s ‘a fine [confined] and private [deprived] place’ and she would be best advised and better satisfied (time not standing still), to offer him her ‘private place’ instead.
In Dowland’s ‘Lady if you so spite me’, the song takes us from the auto-erotic ‘If you seek to spill me’ to a post-coital ‘rest’ where she, having killed him, will have her satisfaction, and he, having died ‘well pleased,’ will ‘rest content’. To ‘die’ is often used of sexual congress, as here, and for example in Othello’s ‘Thus with a kiss I die [he falls upon the bed]’. Othello’s marriage to Desdemona is finally consummated in ‘death.’
On Friday evening it was a joy to experience the fittedness of the texts to the beautiful music we were hearing. In their publicity statement L’Isola, usually made up of 4-6 soloists, make an important point that their group is not a choir but a consort, and that consort singing is exposed and technically demanding.
The effect they say is not a blend but an achieved ‘unity’ of sound where each participant in what they call a ‘creative democracy’ makes an individual mark with his or her particular contribution to the sound
Under the sure guidance of their internationally celebrated Creative Director, bass-voiced Matthew Gouldstone, the consort delivered in solos, duets and groups, (accompanied and unaccompanied), not only music by Dowland, but also work by, for probably many of us, lesser-known figures, such as English composer John Coprario, and in the Italian traditions, Giovanni Batista Guarini, Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder and several others.
It was obvious that Friday evening’s performers were in love with what they do. In two separate Interludes Peter Croton displayed under his touch the lute’s many beautiful capabilities, while L’isola’s matchless vocal delivery revealed how this music can live on to be enjoyed, to delight and surprise through the earnest and informed collective devotion to it of such talented musicians.
JOHN GILROY
