Lautten Compagney Berlin
69:00
deutsche harmonia mundi 19802802402
If you accept the thesis of this CD, that ‘the wonderful sound of the lute and small Baroque ensemble perfectly fits these short pieces from Renaissance and Baroque to the music of the Beatles or Massive Attack’, then you will be perfectly happy with this unorthodox programme. However, while I am a little impatient with the growing fashion of playing pop music on early instruments – I find it hard to believe that anybody buying a CD of music for lute consort is yearning to hear its rendition of Massive Attack’s Psyche, Percy Mayfield’s Hit the road Jack or John Lennon’s Norwegian Wood – lautten compagney BERLIN go a stage further by allowing their tastes in contemporary pop to spill into some of their interpretations of the early material. Thus, my usual approach of just programming out the silly pop numbers and listening to the ‘proper’ repertoire is thwarted, as many of the tracks are influenced to an extent by the pop approach. Annoyingly, when they are playing ‘straight’, the ensemble produces lovely, convincing performances of their chosen material, but blundering into a Dowland track with an appalling skiffle accompaniment throughout made me wary of all the apparently early music on this CD. So as you will gather this CD is definitely not for me, but I do struggle to conceive who it is for – it is always fun for musicians to mess about on period instruments with wildly inappropriate music, but unless potential purchasers of a lautten compagney Berlin CD innocuously entitled ‘The Lute Songbook’ scoured the back for more detail they would be in for a disappointment. Where was ‘the grown-up in the room’ during the planning and execution of this CD?
D. James Ross