The Dowland Project
The Dowland Project took shape as a collaboration between Manfred Eicher, of the ECM classical music label, and the celebrated English tenor John Potter. Originally an attempt to reclaim Renaissance-era songs for modern times, recording centuries-old compositions with contemporary instruments and fresh arrangements, the project has since expanded to include a wide, breathtaking range of periods, origins, and styles. The project's third album, Romaria, is their best yet, with a set of songs ranging in source from Gregorian chant to Iberian folk song. With saxophone, clarinet, violin, viola, and guitar (among other instruments), providing unusual textures and settings—and with Potter's supple, operatic voice rolling out the lush lead melodies—these songs come alive in wonderful and unexpected ways. One listen is enough to convert anyone to the joys of classical European song.
"Got Schepfer Aller Dingen" introduces the album with brittle acoustic guitar, slowly feeling out a cyclical arpeggio. When Potter enters the fray, drawing out his slow sonorous tones, the track seems to cast suddenly, and powerfully, back to an earlier age of mankind. But the crystal recording quality, and the sharp interplay between the guitar and keening violin, simultaneously marks the recording as a distinctly modern affair. "Dulce Solum," a few tracks on, uses Potter's beautiful, elegiac melody as the lynchpin of a piece that explores the wild, suspenseful possibilities of instrumental music. In its climax, between vocal refrains, the track reaches a soaring, almost dissonant instrumental vista, with strings and woodwinds spinning together in a musical eddy. The sound is an invigorating fusion of classical song and 20th-century free jazz.
On some of the album's tracks Potter sounds positively angelic. "O Beata Infantia (Fragment)" begins with light distant strings over which the tenor sings a lone celestial line, coasting on top like a long cloud stretched through a pale blue sky. The number develops into a rich call-and-response between the singer and a saxophone, which lifts from the deep like steam off warm cobblestone streets. Throughout Romaria, Potter and his ensemble turn classical song into something fresh and new while also maintaining its ancient spirit and evocative sense of mystery.