The spirit of Shakespeare hovers over the best classical record of the month

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See, hear, touch, kiss, die…

John Dowland longs for love. Light up!

I sit, I sigh, I cry, I faint, I die…

But no tears can penetrate a heart of flint.

Dark Renaissance troubadour Dowland’s “Come Again” opens Ruby Hughes’ new album. She is a gentle interpreter of melancholy, so sensitive in the pandemic album “End of my days”, which she released with the Manchester Collective in 2024.

Now the British singer has made her Swedish contacts; Lute player Jonas Nordberg and cellist Mime Brinkmann. An ideal trio for four hundred year old Elizabethan passions in eroticism and misery. In sweet pain with John Dowland’s well-known “Flow my Tears” or the mourning tears of a widow. But here and there there are also invigorating interludes like “Mrs. Winter’s Jump”.

Ruby Hughes can sing close, close – almost inaudible in between, but so finely calibrated in an overall pleasant soundscape. When she plays us “Full fathom five,” the original version of “Stormen,” the simple song becomes infinitely sad with its weakness Ding dong Bells accompany Nordberg’s sensitive lute playing.

The spirit of Shakespeare hovers over the album’s 23 songs. Perhaps he took inspiration for Hamlet from the introspective John Dowland, who was also serving at the Danish court. Ruby Hughes’ song selection opens up fantasies about the emotional life of the Elizabethans. Here with additions from later times, such as Henry Purcell’s wonderful study of a kiss or the contemplation of loneliness.

Best title: “Sweeter than Roses”

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