Luogo e data di registrazione		Evagelische Kirche, Séon (Svizzera) - 6-7 settembre 1976
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Gerd Berg / Johann-Nikolaus Matthes
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 063-30 934 Q - (1 lp) - durata 54' 27" - (p) 1977 - Analogico (Quadraphonic)
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - CDM 7 63429 2 - (1 cd) - durata 54' 27" - (c) 1991 - ADD
	Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26502 2 - (1 cd) - durata 54' 27" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

A note about aspects of ornamentation of the songs The song Amarilli mia bella is the best known of Giulio Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche, published in 1602, and remains one of the few italian monodies to survive in popular use to this day, it still being a favourite in singers’ debut recitals. It must have already been well known in England by 1610 for Robert Dowland to include it in his Musicall Banquet. The version performed on this recording is neither Caccini’s original song with figured bass for chitarrone accompaniment, nor Robert Dowland’s realisation in lute tablature, as presented in his Musicall Banquet, but an ornamented in sion of the melody with the accompaniment in tablature for the bass viol from an original MS in the British Museum (Egerton 2971). This version seemed interesting enough to be included in this recording at the risk of being the only song where we have departed from Dowland’s printed version and gone beyond the normal, "standard" (if, in fact there was such a thing at the time) embellishment of it. This MS copy must have belonged to a highly competent professional singer, and represents what might have been a professional singer's approach to the song. There are already several recordings of the song either completely or almost completely unembellished, so perhaps this very ornate version will help restore the balance. No.7 of the collection, To plead my faith by Daniel Batchelar also exists in an ornamented version in Giles Earle’s Song Book (1613). His version is sufficiently different from Batchelar’s original for it not to merit inclusion in a recording of the Musicall Banquet but I have attempted to incorporate at least some of the ornamentation that Earle, a professional singer of the day, put and on the Italian treatises of Caccini, Bovicelli, into the song, without its becoming unrecognis-Ornamentation in general on this record has been spread to England by 1610. Able as the song Batchelar wrote. Conforto etc. whose influence had certainly Nigel Rogers Brief notes on the English lute song "I have also set them tablature-wise to the lute in the Cantus book for one to sing and play alone when your Lordship would retire yourself and be, more private." So wrote Thomas Morley in dedicating his Canzonets or Little Short Aers to Five and Sixe Voices to Sir George Carey in 1597. In these canzonets Morley had simply intabulated the lower parts for lute. Other composers were quick to refine this method in order to make a more idiomatic lute part. The quick decay of the lute's sound meant that long notes needed to be repeated or ornamented, and chords arpeggiated to compensate for this. Any competent lutenist would have done such things automatically, and it is not surprising to find that, with the exception of Morley, all the lute song composers were themselves players. A further innovation (mentioned in the title page of most of the books from 1600 onwards) was the addition of bass viol to strengthen the bass line. Where singer and lutenist were not one and the same person it became usual to demand more from each part, and in many of the later lute songs a more independent role is given to the lute. When the bass viol is present, it too often has an independent part in the form of a second bass line (the lute playing the other). This can be heard in Dowland's In darkness let me dwell, perhaps the finest example of the 'song to the lute and viol'. Of course not all the lute songs have this complexity; some have a simple chordal accompaniment such as would have been playable by any singer-lutenist of the time, and they are very pleasing in their own way. Robert Dowland's Musicall Banquet is unique among English publications for lute and voice: the only one to contain English, French, Spanish, and Italian airs, it is truly a banquet! Whereas most of the English songs have either a contrapuntal or a chordal accompaniment, almost all the foreign songs have chordal accompaniments that tend to move note-for-note with the vocal line. The Italian songs reflect the (for many English lutenists) new basso-continuo accompanying style. Dowland, however, realising that most of his public would be amateurs and unfamiliar with the new way, intabulated a continuo part for the lute. On this recording we have also made use of the bass viol 'after the leero [lyra] way' to accompany two of the songs. Robert Jones and John Coprario offer this method of accompaniment as an alternative to the lute, as does the eccentric Tobias Hume. In O dear life Jordi Savall has followed Captain Hume's advice to "play one straine with your fingers the other with your Bow, and so continue to the end". Anthony Bailes
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"