‘Extremely quiet and incredibly close’ might best describe the jewel in the crown of this year’s Lewes Chamber Music Festival.
A concert of Elizabethan music performed by John Dowland’s own dream team, the 400 years between them deftly bridged by musicianship of very great excellence and beauty - as Dowland might have put it himself.
A sense of total enchantment, as well as the late hour, had the audience pinching themselves to make sure they weren’t dreaming that the world renowned Iestyn Davies and Thomas Dunford had pitched up on their doorstep – indeed that we hadn’t all been transported to a realm more celestial still than Lewes’s All Saints Centre.
Davies’ counter-tenor voice was famously sublime of course, and Thomas Dunford’s lute-playing was equally heavenly. As with all great artists, these two played fast and loose with the rules, laying bare the delicate and mobile structures of Dowland’s writing while letting the blues in through a little breath in music’s space/time continuum.
The quality of quietness is a rare and beautiful thing, the harmony of Iestyn Davies and Thomas Dunford rarer and more beautiful still.
Five stars
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