John Dowland is one of England’s greatest composers. In his lifetime, he was acknowledged as an outstanding lutenist, and his songs have always been popular. Dowland’s distinctive hallmark as a songwriter is his uncanny skill at creating a suitable musical atmosphere for a poem. In 1610, John’s son Robert Dowland (1591-1641), a minor composer of the time, assembled a collection of works by third-party composers entitled A Musicall Banquet and put his own name to it. His father is the most famous of the composers included; there is a suggestion that he helped his 19-year-old son with assembling the collection, hoping that the attribution would launch the young man’s musical career. The musical net of the collection is cast wide, with French and Italian composers as well as English. It was the first collection of lute songs to take this approach, presenting a cross-section of European solo songs c.1600.

Nigel Rogers began singing at an early age as a boy treble and later became a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. After graduating he went first to Italy and then to Germany, where he studied at Munich’s Hochschule für Musik. During the early 1960s he toured all over the world before returning to England, where he began to take a greater interest in Baroque music. He is accompanied here by first-class musicians: lutenists Anthony Bailes and Paul O’Dette, gambist Jordi Savall.