This recording has been reissued in the Essential Baroque Masterpieces collection with an exclusive interview of Thomas Dunford:

"It seemed an obvious decision to devote this fi rst solo recording to Dowland: not only is his music the bible of every lutenist, it has been my companion right from the start. He is one of the greatest composers I’ve played, a true genius of his age, with a completely individual style of writing. At the end of his life, he composed music that remains incredibly modern even for us today, music that, while still observing the rules of counterpoint, handles them in a unique way. I quite simply wanted to record the music I admired most and that meant most to me.

I chose these songs because I’ve known them for a very long time, but also because I had never played them the way Dowland notates them in his collections. He published his four Bookes of Songs in a ‘table’ format so that the widest possible range of musicians could sing and play them – probably at least partly for commercial reasons – and clearly left the choice of performing forces and instruments open: he states that these ayres can be performed with a bass viol or another instrument, with several singers around a table. He lays them out in such a way that soprano and alto can face each other, and the same for bass and tenor. One can imagine four friends sitting round a table in the evening, singing and drinking wine. The polyphony is on the same level as the composer’s harmonic genius.`"

- Thomas Dunford