The pre-eminent lutenist of his day, John Dowland was an almost exact contemporary of William Shakespeare.
This third volume of Dowland’s Lute Music (Volumes 1 and 2 are available on Naxos 8.557586 and 8.557862) explores the three principal dances of the time, Pavans, Galliards and Almains. Of particular note are the strikingly unusual Galliard on a Galliard of Bachelar, which takes the opening four bars of an original dance by Dowland’s contemporary Daniel Bachelar and then branches off into its own world of great variety and fantasy, and the beautiful and serious “Pavana Doulant”, a work written from the very heart of the composer known as the ‘English Orpheus’.
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