Amidst Shades Album Review – Robbie Hughes’ captivating tribute to Dowland steeped in delicious melancholy | classical music

COn Dowland died 400 years ago this year, and we’d be lucky indeed if there were many other compelling tributes like this one from soprano Ruby Hughes, lutenist Jonas Nordberg, and da Gamba violinist Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann. The music is by no means all of Dowland’s music – in fact, the recording takes its title from a song by Purcell, one of its most memorable pieces being a wonderful version of the Corpus Christi Carol as set by Britten – but it’s all steeped in the delicious Elizabethan melancholy that Dowland distilled so effectively.

Hughes’s voice retains a natural quality, for all its refinement, which is captured skillfully – the recording is close enough to be able to be smooth and confident, but there is still a sense of space around the sound. She’s more straightforward than some, coloring each word individually: when she sings in Dowland’s Flow, My Tears about “fear, sadness, and pain,” we’re left in no doubt that these are three different but equally terrible emotions. Yet she, Nordberg, and Brinkmann keep it all in balance, maintaining a compelling sense of line and focus so that the expression registers not as indulgence but as communication. This is as fully evident in the music of Dowland’s contemporaries and in Purcell as in the four new or recent compositions based on the lyrics of Shakespeare’s The End, by Deborah Pritchard, Erroline Whalen, and Cheryl Frances Hoad.

Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify