Nice Puccini, Dave!

I bought a book way back in the mid-70's I think, called The Elizabethan Song Book: Lute Songs , edited by W.H.Auden, Chester Kallman and Noah Greenberg. It has short songs written for lute by Thomas Campion, John Dowland, etc. The songs are more like folk songs than classical songs, and some of them are beautiful.

A couple of years after I bought the book I heard that there was going to be a performance on the radio of some of the songs so I stayed home and listened to it. This was pre-internet, pre-YouTube, even pre me, a poor student, even owning a cassette radio that I could tape the show with.

Boy, was I disappointed in that performance! I was speechless. It was performed in that overdone classical style, which in my opinion was totally opposite to the style of the songs themselves. I am not quite sure whether this is the correct term but someone mentioned "bel canto" above.

I have never heard other people performing the songs until I heard Sting singing some of the John Dowland songs and accompanying the songs on the lute. I think his style suits the songs a lot better.

This morning I found a lovely choral version of Never Weather-beaten Sail - Thomas Campion on YouTube, so it must be time to do some more Googling so that I can finally purge that bitter disappointment out of my soul from 40 years ago.