It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Pop singer Sting is enormously popular, he’s British, and he writes and sings songs about pain, sadness, and paranoia. He has tickled our fancies with such ditties as “King of Pain” and “Bring on the Night”, and one song, “Every Breath You Take”, is a veritable how-to of sexual neuroses. Someone gave him a lute. John Dowland (1563-1626) was enormously popular, British, sang and wrote songs, played the lute, and was one of his century’s most melancholic and popular kvetches. He was paranoid about his position in the Elizabethan political and religious landscape and wrote a groveling, whiny letter to Sir Robert Cecil, then England’s Secretary of State, from which Sting reads on this CD. “Semper Dowland, semper dolens,” (always Dowland, always sad) was his motto; these two are soul brothers across the centuries if ever there were such things. Furthermore, Mr. Sting has studied Dowland’s songs–their meanings, their double-entendres, their subtleties–and has even trained his voice to encompass an occasional upward melismatic piece of hoopla that comes with the music. And his rhythmic sense is as fine as you might expect and offers great vitality in some of the less downbeat songs.
But much is not right and can not be excused as “interpretive”, “crossover”, or pseudo-authentic. It isn’t that the music is unsuitable or too difficult for a pop singer’s voice; Dowland’s music was sung in pubs and sitting rooms by the hoi polloi. Gripe number one: Sting opts to create harmonies by multi-tracking his own voice; it comes across as Dowland meets the Beach Boys and is silly, if not grotesque. Gripe number two: The open-throated, airy singing he adapts in intimate songs tires the ear. Gripe number three: In an attempt, I presume, to enunciate clearly, he does something to vowels that make him sound like he’s on Quaaludes. Gripe number four: The mumbled recitation of the letter is not only in an entirely different acoustic that requires turning the volume up so much that any song that follows blows the listener out of the room, but it is accompanied by occasional quietly tolling bells, chirping birds(!), and, I think, falling rain, and it underlines the “Masterpiece Theater” quality of the whole undertaking. Final gripe: Sting’s breath control can’t handle many of the longer lines, and the phrasing becomes choppy and awkward (taking a breath between the word “the” and the noun that follows, as in “The lowest trees have tops”, makes the text even harder to understand).
There are fine things about this disc, not least Sting’s obvious sincerity and fondness for the music. His singing of “Come again” is witty and knowing without resorting to a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” acknowledgment of the text’s other meanings; “Come heavy sleep” is beautifully put across, sitting in just the right part of his voice; and while “In darkness let me dwell” suffers, as does the whole recording, from being so closely miked that we can practically hear his teeth, Sting’s nasty emphases on the words “hellish” and “jarring” are masterly and effective. Robert Johnson’s “Have you seen the bright lily grow” is nicely sung. Edin Karamazov’s playing of lute and archlute is always a joy–virtuosic while not taking away from the voice’s focus–and Sting’s tinklings on the archlute are very nice as well.
The recording is so excruciatingly inappropriate to the music that I actually would like to hear the program (sans letter reading, please) performed live. The engineers, presumably with Sting’s approval and assistance, have given his voice an acoustic familiar to pop music: compressed and hard-edged. Here, something folkier would have benefited the whole program. This is not to say it would have made the CD a grand success, but as it stands, the ambition and, yes, nobility, of the undertaking is sabotaged by the sound, and it’s a project that needed as little sabotaging as possible. Dowland fans may be curious and somewhat intrigued, but those wanting to know more about this music would be wise to stick with the likes of Andreas Scholl and Emma Kirkby.
