Music - Dermot Clinch on an unsatisfying rendition of John Dowland's melancholic songs
John Dowland's song "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" expresses emotional intensity to an "extent unsurpassed in any other song of the Elizabethan period". So it was extra generous of the performers on a new CD to furnish the song with further particulars. Dowland's melancholy masterpiece is prefaced on In Darkness Let Me Dwell by the shuddering of double bass and the moaning of saxophone; the howl, later, of what sounds like microphone feedback is presumably the saxophone at it again, portraying, in the words of the CD's notes, "what we now think of as 'alienation' ".
Renaissance period, saxophone, alienation: we can only have bought a CD on the ECM New Label with a grey North Sea on the front cover and a grey landscape inside. Might there be a connection with Officium and Mnemosyne, the label's earlier CDs, in which renaissance sacred music was given the melancholy sax treatment by Jan Garbarek? The yoking together of the ancient and modern with the miserable and marketable is ECM's forte. With the songs of John Dowland - "Flow My Tears", "Weep You No More, Sad Fountains", "Lachrimae Tristes" - it must have thought it had hit gold once more.
But the trend has reached an impasse, and the performers' imaginations have this time failed to take flight. "Come Heavy Sleep" is a simple song expressing a simple death wish in simple terms. On In Darkness Let Me Dwell it is an annex to 40 seconds of amorphous preamble: demonstratively nightmarish tapping on the strings and wood of the double bass before the tenor's invocation of sleep, "the image of true death". The lute - Dowland's instrument of choice - is only subsequently permitted to provide the gentle, subtly supportive role the composer envisaged.
On two light-hearted numbers - "Come Again" and "Fine Knacks for Ladies" - the instrumental ensemble resorts to identical processes, and their variations on the songs' themes have a Draughtsman's Contract bumptiousness that communicates that they, too, recognise the peculiar levity, given the circumstances, of the songs. On this CD it is a pity that the occasional witty digressions of John Surman's saxophone and clarinet are outweighed by whiffy musical melodramatics.
The recording is hedged with large claims. We have "lost sight of the fact that Dowland was also an improviser". John Potter - the tenor voice on the CD - "restores improvisational flexibility" to Dowland's songs. Potter is a member of the Hilliard Ensemble, which collaborated on ECM's earlier crossover successes with Jan Garbarek. He sings with admirable English sang-froid. But Hilliard-style vocal production - beautifully enunciated, psalmodically well behaved - finds the authentic improvisational esprit outside its reach. The neat click of Potter's consonants, the swell of the voice as it approaches a textbook enjambement, can be lovely. But it is nothing revolutionary.
The performers, with a mix of jazz and classical backgrounds between them, lament the loss to 20th-century music of the flexible, vocally inspired approach to performance. But it has been coming back; and the contribution of commercial projects such as Officium, where text-reading and improvisational performance meet on common ground, should not be underestimated. What should be underestimated are claims such as Potter's that the new recording represents "the first time that anyone's ever approached Dowland not from an early music angle but just as music".
In the 1940s Sir Michael Tippett wrote that he felt able to approach Dowland - and Byrd, and Gibbons - not "as names in a history book, but as composers of living music". Each age approaches old music in the way it knows best: recreates the music in its own light. Poor, melancholy Dowland - Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens, as his autobiographical tag put it - needed from ECM's New Label the laying aside of great claims for once and the substitution of some more sensitive, respectful musicianship.
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