Before all the "splendour and corruption was gone", when reigned "the dark night, the monstrous downpour, the violent surges of the flood, the huddle of little black, beetle-browed houses, the cobbled pavements that reeked of garbage and ordure", when "the irregular and huddled purlieus which had been the city of London in the reign of Elizabeth" "lay crowded, a mere huddle and conglomeration of houses", with "the stars reflecting themselves in deep pits of stagant water which lay in the middle of the streets", when "troops of ruffians, men and women unspeakably interlaced, lurched down the streets, trolling out wild songs with jewels flashing in their ears, and knives gleaming in their fists", when "danger and insecurity, lust and violence, poetry and filth swarmed over the tortuous Elizabethan highways and buzzed and stank in the little rooms and narrow pathways of the city", and before pharmaceutical companies had invented color-coded pills for every and any ailment, English music was known in Europe for its special strains of melancholy, and its greatest champion was John Dowland.Don't trust the track listing provided on this entry, it is obviously for another disc, and the most likely candidate is another CD from Challenge Classics, CC 77027, Sacred Works of Vivaldi sung by Suzie Leblanc. This here is the legitimate entry for CC 77017, EAN 608917201727, Dowland Lachrimae or Seven Teares and other Pavanes by Musica Antiqua Köln under Reinhard Goebel. It is a reissue of a CD first published under the label Vanguard - Netherlands and badly listed on this website, Dowland;Lachrymae. The liner notes, written by Goebel himself, don't entirely eludicate the logic of the recital, but it is made more clear when one consults Dowland's entry on Wikipedia, where the complete title of his instrumental cycle is given: "Lachrimae or Seaven Tears [that's where the CD's title ends], Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans" for string quintet, each based on the theme derived fom Dowland's lute song "Flow my tears", and "one of the best known collections of consort music in his time" (to which Goebel adds: "the first secular instrumental cycle in the history of music"). To those, Goebel adds a choice of other Pavanes, some of them based on the same theme (Heinrich Scheidemann's Pavane Lachrimae for harpsichord solo track 8, Johann Schop's Pavane Lachrimae for Violin solo and continuo track 9), to show the wide-ranging influence of Dowland's cycle on "a whole generation of northern composers around 1600". Two are also by Dowland, including his famous "Semper Dowland semper Dolens", which nicely summarizes the composer's psychological outlook.All this sounds promising, but I'm afraid the recital doesn't entirely live up to its promises. The mood of Dowland's seven pavanes is very uniform, going from melancholy to despondency, and as they are based on the same thematic material, their 27+ minutes don't offer much musical variety either - seven times the same thing, something like Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ, in shorter, but less varied and less dramatic. Dowland's Semper Dowland semper dolens is much in the same style, mood and atmosphere, although the music is slightly more animated at the end. The rest offers a little more diversity, with the violin flourishes of Schop's Pavana Lachrimae, the (comparative) playfulness of Farina's (track 12), the greater muscularity and drive of Scheidt's (track 13), and the greater passion of Dowland's Pavane in C major (track14) coming as a welcome contrast and fillip. Still, they are like ripples in a calm sea of repetition.As already mentioned, Goebel's program notes are frustrating. He devotes a number of parapraphs explaining that Pavanes are not to be confused with Chaconnes - okay, but since no Chaconne is played in the recital, what's the point? But he doesn't say anything specific about the individual pieces. Were are told in the track listing that Scheidemann's Pavana is a recording premiere, fine, but why, where, who unearthed it, from where, and who was he? More irritating still, Goebel claims that "it can hardly be disputed [ouch! that's the sentence everybody begins with when they have something very disputable to say] that the gamba quintet with lute was Dowland's intended ideal scoring", but he then goes on to say that "the violins" are already mentioned in the printed edition of 1605 (oh? so the gamba quintet and lute wasn't Dowland's ideal scoring for Seaven Teares?), and adds that "it is clear [ouch! the phrase everybody begins with when it is not so clear] that Dowland was hardly thinking of the high lamento scoring such as Biber or Schmelzer would have used, but rather of a mixed scoring a beneplacito" (e.g. "according to wish") - okay, I'll take your word for it - and then ends up playing them neither with gamba quintet and lute, nor with a mixed score a beneplacito, but with the Biber/Schmelzer lineup. I don't get the logic.But I still think music is a better cure for melancholy than those color-coded pills. Is that why I spend so much time listening?