Byrd/ Holborne/ Smith - Mad Dog

Hopkinson Smith has been praised as one of the masters of repertoires for early plucked instruments and produced over 25 prizewinning recordings for naive - for instance, the recording of his lute arrangements of the Bach solo violin Sonatas and Partitas, released in the year 2000, has been called by Gramophone 'the best recording of these works on any instrument'. This is a new fascinating journey that is now offered to us, in the heart of th eElizabethan Age. This anthology contains four pieces connected with John Dowland and others by contemporaries from the generation of lute composers that preceded him. This is Hopkinson Smith who named the piece called 'Mad Dog', as a symbol of his create process: 'There are many orphaned lute pieces in English sources that have come down to us with no name at all. I have taken the liberty of christening four such pieces in this program with names that seem to suit their musical spirits. As we grow into a repertoire and ingest it's language and freedoms, a process of entering the creativity of an age gradually takes place. A fluency develops that leads to many types of extemporization. The naming of unnamed pieces can be seen as a natural extension of this.'