Nicolas Vallet - Lute Music

Facts Vallet: Lute MusicThe lute master Nicolas Vallet (c.1583- c.1642) lived and worked in a borderland between musical categories. The first three decades of his life were spent in France, then his musical career and published compositions unfolded in Amsterdam. Vallet lived when the lute was undergoing significant changes in terms of tuning, right hand technique and predominant genres, with the impulse for some of these changes coming from his French compatriots. Yet he demonstrates that the older Renaissance approaches towards both composition and performance are still relevant. An impressive part of his repertoire comprises contrapuntal preludes and fantasias following the manner of the masters of previous generations, in which various thematic motives and complex abstract forms are woven into the polyphonic texture. This album shows that Vallet's output covers the three instrumental genres of the Renaissance: free abstract pieces (preludes and fantasias), dances and settings of vocal pieces. For this recording a ten-course lute is used, strung in gut at 415 Hz. This type of gut stringing considerably affects the overall sound of the lute, it's resonance and sonority, hopefully bringing the lute a bit closer to what one might imagine as an 'original' sound of the time