Barefoot Chamber Concerts ("an enterprise noted for both its quality and informality" - San Francisco Classical Voice) presents really good music in the right acoustic and without the formality of most classical music events.
The Barefoot All-Stars (Erik Andersen, Wendy Gillespie, Peter Hallifax, Julie Jeffrey, and Lynn Tetenbaum, viols) and lutenist superstar John Lenti present a program honoring John Dowland on the 400th anniversary of his death.
In 1605, Dowland, the greatest lutenist of his time, published perhaps his most famous chamber music: "Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares." It is a set of seven "passionate pavans" for a lute and five viols. The opening pavan is an instrumental rendition of Dowland's most famous lute song "Flow, my Tears." Played in sequence, each pavan magically recasts the material of the original in endlessly inventive ways, and the cycle as a whole can be experienced as an evolving exploration of melancholy's many facets - a unique compositional feat.
Melancholy was a main theme of the Elizabethan poets and musicians, and Dowland was one of its high priests. So many of his solo lute pieces and lute songs reflect this, and we have chosen to stay with the mood for the whole concert: as well as the Lachrimae cycle, we will feature the famous "Forlorn Hope" fantasy for solo lute, and "Semper Dowland semper dolens," perhaps his most extreme statement of melancholy for a consort of viols, as well as works by contemporaneous composers inspired by Lachrimae and the spirit of the age.
All of this will be in the newly refurbished Magdalen Hall (parish hall) of Saint Mary Magdalen, Berkeley, the perfect acoustical setting for this, the consummate work of the great John Dowland.
$25.
Presented by Barefoot Chamber Concerts