A Mortal Muse – Dowland’s Foundry

Dowland’s Foundry […] encapsulate what Dowland called in a preface‘The consent of speaking harmony’…
Dame Emma Kirkby

In 1606, English composer and lutenist John Danyel dedicated his only songbook to a wildly unconventional muse – his brilliant young student. Songs to Anne Greene are a treasure of Jacobean art, telling an unorthodox love story with uncommon brilliance, humanity, and wry wit. Interlacing Danyel’s works with those of his famous playwright brother Samuel Danyel, and of their contemporaries John Dowland and William Shakespeare, as well as a new arrangement of William Byrd’s Ye Sacred Muses, Renaissance music specialists Dowland’s Foundry will create a colourful and dramatic performance in the stunning setting at Magdalen College.

Duration of performance is 70 minutes, no interval.

Dowland’s Foundry: Gwendolen Martin, soprano, Clemmie Franks, alto, Daniel Thomson, tenor, Timothy Dickinson, bass, and Sam Brown, lute.
A decade ago, a group of interested musicians began to sing through a little-visited corner of music: a treasury of domestic songs to be sung to the lute, printed at the turn of the 17th century. Between their leaves, the members of Dowland Works encountered some of the finest music ever written.

In 2023, five devotees of this collective – all confirmed colleagues on the early music stage – established Dowland’s Foundry: an ensemble whose heartland repertoire is the golden age of Elizabethan song, and named after its most iconic exponent, the lutenist John Dowland. 

Will Keen has just finished playing Vladimir Putin on the West End and Broadway, in Peter Morgan’s ‘Patriots’, for which he won an Olivier and a Theatre World award. Previously, he has played leading roles, both classical and modern, in the West End and at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, Donmar Warehouse, Almeida Theatre, Royal Court, Hampstead Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, among many other London theatres, many regional theatres, and throughout Europe and the world. He will shortly be playing Iago for the RSC.

His extensive TV work includes ‘Wolf Hall’, ‘The Musketeers’, ‘Sherlock’, ‘The Crown’, ‘His Dark Materials’, ‘Ridley Road’, and ‘The Pursuit of Love’.