This announcement has just come from the Lute Society: Wigmore Hall, 5.00pm, Jakob Lindberg, lutes & cister, Dan Laurin, recorders, Anna Emilsson, soprano
Sunday 20 March 2005 I doubt if I�ll be able to get there, unfortunately. I know that, years ago, Jakob Lindberg had a seven-course French �cistre� and was contemplating playing some Bellman accompaniments on it. (Bellman is a huge figure in 18th C. Swedish culture and he played a guittar-like instrument. But the many songs he published � often just popular melodies but with Bellman�s highly distinctive lyrics - just have a simple bass line, not an idiomatic, plucked string accompaniment.) So in this concert Lindberg is playing a �cister� and presumably he has got a more authentic, local, instrument than a French (18th C) cistre. I have an old vinyl recording of Martin Best singing and playing Bellman songs (in English) and Best accompanies himself on an instrument which is supposed to be a reconstruction and with accompaniments that Best must have concocted. They sound very striking and dramatic but not really much like the songs with accompaniment you get in Britain or France. There was a discussion a while ago on the lutelist about Bellman, with some people claiming that the Bellman�s instrument was a bell cittern. The famous portrait of Bellman only shows a bit of the instrument � not enough to clearly identify it. Kenneth Sparr thought that the instrument probably was a cistre-like instrument and the fragments of music on his website for the �Swedish cittern� is for an A-tuned instrument. It would be interesting to know what Lindberg has come up with � both the instrument and the manner of accompaniment. ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
