Hopkinson Smith – Bright & Early (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:44 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve
Hopkinson Smith, gefeiert als der »oberste Poet der Laute« (Gramophone), schafft auf seinem neuesten Album einen subtilen, intimen Dialog zwischen Dalza und Spinacino, die mit ihren Werken die blühende Kultur des Instruments in Italien zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts bezeugen. Seit über 40 Jahren der unermüdliche Pionier, erforscht er in dieser Einspielung, untermauert von seinem historisches Wissen und seiner profunden Intuition, die ersten Notendrucke für Laute.
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Hopkinson Smith, Mariana Flores – Dowland: Whose Heavenly Touch (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:42 minutes | 963 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique
“In his darker works, one is abandoned at the depths of a dry well, far from any light, alone with ogres and demons, and just as Dowland goes to extremes in his textual allusions, in a like manner he will twist and turn the lutenist’s hands to wring the excruciating essence from the text. In another moment, he can elicit an almost ferocious capriciousness with as many colours as a rainbow where the lute, which was his instrument of torture a few minutes before, suddenly rises to unexpected heights of lightness and eloquent folly.”
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Hopkinson Smith – Mad Dog (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:53 minutes | 494 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique
Some people will be angry, others will laugh, but since there are many orphaned lute pieces in English sources that have come down to us with no name at all, Hopkinson Smith has taken the liberty of christening four such pieces in this program with names that seem to suit their musical spirits. The title of the album itself, Mad Dog (admittedly something that doesn’t quite sound like a respectable name for a Renaissance music album, but marketing will be marketing), is taken from such an apocryphal title given my Smith to what is really a galliard by Anthony Holborne found in the 2nd Matthew Holmes Lute Book. Ward’s Repose is a homage to Smith’s deceased musicology teacher… But, as so marvellously said by the Bard, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, so who cares really what these pieces were or were not called back four hundred years ago, when wen don’t even really know who wrote or arranged some of them – and here again, what’s in a name, be it Dowland, Byrd (whose lute pieces are all rewritings of keyboards works as done by his contemporary Francis Cutting), Johnson, when just the beauty of the music counts… Hopkinson Smith plays an 8-course lute built in the 1970s by Joel van Lennep, one of the world’s foremost lute-doctors and instrument makers.
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Hopkinson Smith – Bach: Suites n° 1, 2 & 3 (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:54 minutes | 550 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © naïve classique
One of today’s ‘popes’ of early and baroque lute playing, Hopkinson Smith returns to the magic masterpieces of Bach and records the renowned Suites BWV 1007, 1008 and 1009, transcribed by himself for the German theorbo…
Bach was a musical ecologist, the masterful recycler of his own compositions, arranging more than a few from one instrument or combination of instruments to another. Many of his works seem conceived on a somewhat abstract plane, above and beyond any specific instrument, and it was completely natural for the pragmatic 18th-century mind and ear to adapt them to the instrument of its choice.
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