La Nef takes lute songs to pub

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      Montreal-based sextet La Nef feels that its audiences should experience something of the social vibrancy that characterized performances of early classical music at the time it was written. And the group is not afraid to ruffle a few bristling feathers with its lively musical exploration Dowland in Dublin.

      Subtitled An Evening of Lute Songs in an Irish Pub, the show takes some intriguing Celtic-coloured routes through a selection of airs and tunes by John Dowland, who’s regarded as the most popular English composer of Shakespeare’s time, and further suggests that he may have been Irish.

      “The evidence isn’t clear,” says Michael Slattery, singer with La Nef, reached in New York City. “But he was a Catholic, certainly had relatives there, and attended Trinity College [Dublin].…Our idea was to regard the melodies of his works like Irish fiddle tunes. Dowland’s music is so beautifully orchestrated with all the contrapuntal lines, but it’s also interesting that his melodies can stand on their own as folk tunes. Yet nobody treats them like that. There’s always such a seriousness around the performance of this music.”

      Seán Dagher, who plays cittern with La Nef and arranged most of the material for Dowland in Dublin, has worked hard to ensure that he and his La Nef colleagues—Slattery, lutenist and musical director Sylvain Bergeron, flute and recorder player Grégoire Jeay, cellist Amanda Keesmatt, and violinist Alex Kehler—offer something for everyone, and show a lighter side of the famously melancholic Dowland.

      “We weren’t trying to bring out the inherent folkness of his music, we were adding our own folkness,” says Dagher, from his Montreal home. “In some cases I wrote the arrangements. With the songs it was really, ‘Here’s the melody, here are the chords, do what you can and when we hear something good we’ll keep it.’ On [opening piece] ‘Behold a Wonder Here’ we really just jammed it like in an Irish session, with me guiding—arranging the form and texture rather than the actual notes, which were left to the improvisation of the musicians.

      “That’s extreme,” he continues. “On the other side there are songs Michael did straight up—just lute and voice. We wanted to show the whole range of possible treatments. Sometimes I deliberately contradicted Dowland’s harmonies, but most often I didn’t look at the original harmonization of the melody until I’d done my own. A lot of the time it was the same, but sometimes quite different.”

      The only melody that’s not by Dowland is the anonymous “Kemp’s Jig”, signature tune of William Kempe, actor, dancer, clown, and colleague of Shakespeare. It leads off a set of instrumental tunes with the intriguing titles “Mistress Winter’s Jump” and “My Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe”. “We played them with the gusto of folk dance, though we didn’t go as far as with some of the songs, like ‘Time Stands Still’, for which I went out of my way to avoid the original,” says Dagher.

      As for the evening’s two galliards, La Nef gives them very different treatment. “ ‘The Frog’ is done the original, traditional way—as Dowland would have played it. The second, ‘Mr. Bucton’s Galliard’, sounded like a heavy-metal tune when I played it through, and that’s what I was going for in the arrangement. We had heavy bass, big drum, cello, [viola da] gamba, cittern, and guitar all blasting away on the continuo line. I didn’t mind if we couldn’t hear the melody properly—though on the recording we made, with the mikes and the mixing, you can hear every note of the melody. That was the energy I was going for—to really make it rock out.”

      Rave on, John Dowland.

      Early Music Vancouver presents La Nef Dowland in Dublin at the Orpheum Annex on Friday (October 3).

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