It all started last year, when my wife Susanna Pell and I released our first duo CD, entitled Division-Musick. Alina and I got into a dialogue via Facebook (we had never met), and agreed a CD exchange: I was to send her Division-Musick, and she would send me her Froberger CD. Well, that was it! I listened a few times to the Froberger disc, and realised a few things: firstly, this was the most beautiful harpsichord CD I'd ever heard -- the playing is superlatively expressive, the instrument (a famous original Ruckers harpsichord) is magnificent, the recorded sound achieved by Carpe Diem's producer/engineer, Jonas Niederstadt, is perfect, and Froberger's music divine. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I had the feeling (both from the recording and from our dialogue) that Alina was musically a kindred spirit, who experienced the music (particularly the often melancholy music of the early seventeenth century) in just the way that I experience it.
My natural response when I come across a piece of music that I love is to try to find a way to play it on the lute. My natural response when I come across a musician that I really connect with (in whatever genre of music) is to try to find a way to make music together. Alina had said that she'd love to meet me next time I'm in Germany. So I wrote back and said that I had an idea for a duo project: a concert and CD programme entitled "Mr. Dowland's Midnight", in which Dowland's lute music is placed alongside some of the many wonderful early seventeenth-century keyboard settings by his contemporaries. This would be not so much a duo programme as a "joint solo programme". To my delight, Alina replied with a big YES.
So I began formulating some ideas (including concocting pieces for us to play together), and last week, after a giving two concerts in Potsdam, I found myself staying with Alina and Jonas in their new home in Berlin for a couple of days, where we played together pretty much non-stop, and formulated a programme, complete with running order. I won't go on now about the generous hospitality of Alina and Jonas, or about the great conversations we had, or the remarkable ways in which our ideas about music seemed to coincide (oh, and the great food!). Suffice it to say that we connected musically at least as well as I had hoped; it gave me an enormous boost to exchange music in this way, and to embark on what I think is an extremely exciting new musical project. Video clips of some of the work we did are at the bottom of this page.
Under "normal" circumstances, I probably would not have thought of doing a Dowland project on lute and harpsichord. It might seem at first a slightly peculiar idea, given that Dowland did not write for the combination. But my inspirations were, as I say, Alina's musicianship, her affinity with the music of the period, and the rather high-quality body of surviving Dowland keyboard transcriptions. And, in the end, the project has morphed somewhat. Yes, I'm still doing a few solos. And yes, Alina is too. But we've chosen to "concoct" quite a lot of duo material, simply because, as Jonas put it: "your duetting is really special -- why not do a project together in which you play mainly together, rather than mainly separately?" (These are not his words, but that was his point, I think.) I know of no music specifically for lute and keyboard from Dowland's time. But I know of lots of paintings which show the two playing together. And, more importantly, I know that musicians of the time were constantly adapting music for the available forces. In precisely that sense, we are doing something which is entirely "authentic".
As I said earlier, when I fall in love with a particular piece of music, I try to find a way to play it and when I hear a musician whose playing goes straight to my heart, I try to find a way to make music with that musician. With Alina and Mr. Dowland, I feel that I am doing both.
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