Music itself and its power to console was the underlying theme of countertenor Iestyn Davies’s lockdown recital with lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, a concert of sweet, melancholy songs and solo instrumental pieces.
It opened with Strike the Viol, Touch the Lute from Purcell’s Come, Ye Sons of Art, and closed with Hide Me From Day’s Garish Eye from Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato, with its yearning to experience “sweet music sent by some spirit to mortals good” after withdrawal from the world in sleep. In between came more Purcell, including three of Kenny’s own theorbo transcriptions of his keyboard pieces, lute songs by Dowland and Campion, and Lieder by Mozart and Schubert, their accompaniments arranged on this occasion for guitar.
In fine voice, Davies sang with quiet eloquence and wonderful evenness of tone. The slowly unfolding lines of Mozart’s Abendempfindung and Schubert’s Am Tage Aller Seelen sounded particularly beautiful. The florid Alleluias of Purcell’s Lord, What is Man? had wonderful liquidity, and the dark introspection of Campion’s The Sypres Curten of the Night is Spread, in which care robs the poet of his sleep, contrasted finely with the urbane wit of the same composer’s I Care Not for These Ladies.
The underlying sadness of Dowland’s songs, meanwhile, can spill into his instrumental pieces, and Kenny’s performance of his The King of Denmark’s Galliard captured the ambivalence of music that reflects even as it dances. Keenly alert to shifts in mood and meaning as an accompanist, and ceaselessly engaging in her solos, she played with beautifully understated dexterity throughout.
• Available on BBC Sounds or Wigmore Hall live.
