Benjamin Narvey - Repertoire

As a scholar of the French Baroque, I have a special love of the lute as it existed in France during the Grand Siècle. However, as a player I feel at home on all the major lute types. In addition to baroque lutes, I play all renaissance lutes, the archlute, the baroque guitar, and both Italian and German theorboes. For several years, while I was a student at the Guildhall School in London under Dai Miller (1998-2002),

I focused exclusively as a soloist on the so-called "Renaissance" lute that is to say, a lute in nominal pitch "G" tuning, with between six to ten courses, that was used throughout the Renaissance and into the baroque era. My first love was for the English repertoire as typified by Thomas Robinson, John Johnson, Ferrabosco the Elder, John Danyel, and above all, the great John Dowland. I also explored the relation between the English lute song and the French air de cour. I spent most of my time as an accompanist in London performing the lute songs of these two national types. It was also during these years that I began to discover the lute, archlute, and theorbo (or "chitarrone") music of seventeenth-century Italian masters such as Simone Molinaro, Alessandro Piccinini and Girolamo Kapsberger. Later, my time in Oxford proved extremely useful as a player, since the luxury of pure research granted the time to focus on instruments and styles contemporaneous to my work. I was able to spend the entire academic year 2002-2003 working exclusively on the beautiful and esoteric repertoire of the French theorbo. The academic year following, 2003-2004, I shifted tack and could focus entirely on French lute music of the Grand Siècle, and its artistic progeny across the Rhine as best typified by the composers Sylvius Leopold Weiss and Jan Antonin Losy, Count of Losinthal. Over the course of many years, I have also had the good fortune to accompany a host of talented artists from all over Europe, covering repertoire that has been equally varied. On all varieties of long-necked lutes, I have accompanied Monteverdi, Handel, Bach, Rossi, Purcell, Corelli, Biber, Dering, Campra, Lully, Marais, and a host of other composers of opera, oratorio, madrigals, masses, and all manner of chamber music be it sacred, secular, pompous or profane.