SOMM RECORDINGS celebrates the 400th anniversary of two Renaissance masters of the First Golden Age of English Song: John Dowland (1563– 1626) and John Danyel (1564–1626). This recital for tenor and lute takes its name from Dowland’s song, Time Stands Still.

The recording features British tenor Kieran White, who was a chorister at Wells Cathedral and held a Kohn Foundation Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music. The Guardian has praised White’s “pure, luminous tenor” and Opera magazine his “extraordinary emotional clarity”. He performs with long-time collaborator and friend, the Swiss French lutenist Cédric Meyer, who holds two Masters of Arts and a postgraduate certificate with a specialisation in early music. Meyer plays here on his personally handcrafted 8-course Renaissance lute, based on an extant Italian lute from 1592.

Lute songs, or “ayres”, combine music and poetry to create songs that are filled with love, melancholy, and despair. John Dowland is acknowledged as the premier secular lute song composer of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, with a special affinity for the melancholy. It was a distinction he relished, even punning on his own name in the lute solo Semper Dowland, semper dolens – Always Dowland, always doleful.

Dowland’s status as a god of early music enthusiasts is matched by his astute business sense. To prevent unscrupulous printers from distributing his work in pirated editions, Dowland preserved his music by publishing it himself. The lute songs on this recording come from the First Booke of Songes or Ayres, published in 1597; the Second Booke, 1600; the Third and Last Booke, 1603; and A Musicall Banquet published by Dowland’s son Robert in 1610. The texts are predominantly by anonymous authors.

Unlike his enterprising publication of lute songs, Dowland never printed a definitive collection of his solo lute music. The four lute solos recorded here come from varying sources, with the result that not all can be definitively attributed. Nevertheless, the solo instrumental pieces offer a taste of the highly refined art of lute playing at the turn of the 17th century.

Dowland’s superstar reputation is diametrically opposed to that of his exact contemporary, John Danyel, whose vocal music survives in a single, slender volume, First Booke of Songes or Ayres – twenty-one Songs for the lute, viol, and voice – published in 1606. Danyel seems to have come from a wealthy family. He graduated from Oxford, served as a tutor and court musician, and his privacy could well have been by choice. Yet these few pieces that have survived illustrate the uniquely sensitive mind of a skillful composer. Despite being less prolific and remaining comparatively obscure, noted early music specialists consider every one of Danyel’s extant works a masterpiece.