Silly bees and nightly cares: Dowland songs

2026 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of John Dowland, Elizabethan England's greatest lute-songster. In his lifetime, Dowland enjoyed widespread fame, aided by his four books of songs, published over twenty years to spectacular success.

Dowland's Foundry presents this music in the technicolour for which it was imagined: as songs for four voices, so written for "all of the parts, or either of them severally, to be sung to the lute". Unlike the more common singer and accompanist combo, this realisation bears more affinity to a family argument or to a headful of unquiet thoughts: a perfect vehicle for the mintings of Dowland's wry, loving, and irreverent genius.