Fresh from his multi-volume exploration of Dowland’s lute works,
Nigel North now turns his attention to one of Dowland’s younger
contemporaries, Robert Johnson. Johnson was taken under the
care of Sir George Carey, later to become Lord Chamberlain to
Elizabeth I. Carey – later Lord Hudson - was also patron of
the acting company called The Lord Chamberlaine’s – later The
King’s – Men, which numbered Shakespeare among its members.
Indeed Johnson was to write music for plays by him, as well
as plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, and John Webster. He was
also active in court masques, working alongside such as Ben
Jonson and Thomas Campion. For these he would write dance music
and play the lute in the accompanying band. There are examples
of his work in this sphere in this disc; for Ben Jonson and
also for George Chapman’s ‘Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln’s
Inn’, from which derives The Noble Man.
Still, his surviving music is small in number. Some 24 pieces
are left to us, the earliest, Dowland-influenced, for the 7-course
lute. Later he wrote for the nine- or ten-course lute and North
duly plays a ten-course instrument after Hans Frei, made by
Lars Jönsson – there’s serendipity for you – made in 2005, pitched
at A=392.
North plays the music with accustomed eloquence. He responds
to its obvious lyric appeal with a wide range of tone colours
and technical precision, bringing it strongly to life. The
Prince’s Almain, Masque and Coranto is warmly textured,
but not pressed too hard, whilst the incipient gravity of the
first Pavan is conveyed through its expressive weight.
Moving with grace, the Galliard: My Lady Mildmay’s Delight
is a most attractive composition. North admits to having ‘improved’
the divisions in the second Pavan, feeling the original to have
been ‘not good enough to have been Johnson’s’: scholars, please
debate. It’s also the longest work in this selection. He embellishes
the repeats in the third Pavan because the surviving copy has
no divisions.
North’s great clarity of articulation is perhaps at its most
acute in his playing of The Noble Man and Johnson is
at his most explicitly lyric, and thus Johnsonian, in The
Fairies’ Dance, a marvellous, ballad-like piece, explicitly
vocalised and carried off with great assurance. North’s lower
strings ring out with rounded and doleful tone in the Fantasie
in which colour is varied with great skill. The fourth Pavan
– the Pavans are a problematic area of Johnson’s compositions
– is not set in an original version but only in a keyboard arrangement
by Giles Farnaby. North has used the Farnaby to attempt to re-establish
the lute original, and it certainly sounds very plausible in
his hands. The Satyre’s Dance is another instance of
North’s reconstructive art, as the original lute version has
again not survived.
If your interest in lute music extends to a theatrical, Shakespearean
or other context, then you will greatly enjoy North’s well recorded
and textually and digitally elevated performances. He brings
things, as ever, vividly to life.
Jonathan Woolf
Nigel North (lute) 
