Love and Loss in Thaxted: Alexander Chance and Toby Carr

Love and Loss: Music for Countertenor & Lute Songs by Dowland, Danyel, Rosseter, Campion, Purcell, Blow and Cynthia Harper. Alexander Chance (countertenor); Toby Carr (lute). Thaxted Parish Church, 22.06.2025 (9pm) 

A stroll through Elizabethan lute song as the sun sets is just the ticket, Especially after Nicky Spence and Dylan Perez’s spectacular recital earlier this particular evening. While Spence and Perez took the stage, Alexander Chance and Toby Carr opted for the more intimate crossing of the church, eh point at which the transcept intersects the main body of the building. 

Countertenor Alexander Chance won the 2022 International Handel Singing Competition in London (the first countertenor to do so); Toby Carr is major upcoming lutenist who has worked with English Touring Opera, the Royal Opera House and La Nuova Musica. Together, Chance and Carr released their debut album, Drop Not, My Eyes, on Linn Records. 

It was fitting the recital began with Dowland, whose First Book of Songs or Ayres (1597) was such an important factor in the shift from English madrigal to song as the lutenists came o the ascendent. Five Knacks for Ladies comes from the Second Book of Songs or Ayres (1600), setting an anonymous pom long thought to be a peddlar’s song (although this interesting analysis in The Guardian – it was Poem of the Week some 17 years ago – suggests different). The performance by Chance and Carr was lovely, rhythmically alive and sprung. A lute solo was the perfect contrast: Tarlton’s Resurrection (also known as ‘Tarleton’s Riserrectione,’ possibly used in the theatre as the ‘Tarleton’ in question was probably the Elizabethan actor Richard Tarleton). Performed to complete silence from the audience, this was a magical spinning of lines from Carr, an exiting from the now to a very different time.  

Also from the Second Book is one of Dowland’s most famous songs, Flow, my Teares. In a spoken introduction to the music of this evening, Chance explained how melancholy was seen as a ‘real’ illness, one of the ‘Four Temperaments’ (matching the ‘Four Humours’); Hippocrates also saw melancholy as a distinct ‘disease,’ and the Elizabethans agreed. Melancholy, in its Elizabethan sense, pervades Dowland’s output and that of most of his contemporaries, and its purest incarnation is surely, Flow my tears. Chance’s sheer accuracy and cleanliness of Chance’s slurs in this piece was remarkable. Finally for the first Dowland group of the recital, Can she excuse my wrongs, agile and accurate, full of cheeky metric play. 

The Somerset-born composer John Danyel (1564- c. 1626) was one of several composers  whose ayres ‘compare favourably with Dowland,’ in the words of Gustave Reese (Music  in the Renaissance, Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1954); Danyel is mentioned alongside Michael Cavendish, Robert Jones, Campion (whom we meet shortly), Rosseter (ditto), Pilkington and Thomas Ford. The first song was Coy Daphne fled, which must have brought the weight for recent history to bear with it: Alexander’s father, Michael Chance, recorded this with Paul Beier. Perhaps the live aspect worked in Alexander’s favour, his interpretation is just that bit more lively and involving anyway. The song is bifuracted: initially, Daphne flees Phoebus (Apollo); the second stanza an ‘answer’ (the final line is ‘she rests still Green, and so wish I to be’.  Danyel probably used Arthur Golding’s 1565-7 translation of Ovid. The song was written for one 'Mistress Anne Grene’: ‘Daphne’ is Greek for laurel, an evergreen. ‘Let not Cloris think’ (also seen as ‘Chloris’) is a galliard, and also a gentle narration. An interludial pavan next, Rosa (sometimes called ‘Rosamund’), a lute whispering before the beautifully simple song setting of Thou Pretty Bird, just the odd cross-rhythm moving the music forwards. Chance and Carr interpret each song with each care, always seeing the bigger picture so cadences’ arrivals seem so natural. 

The next two composers are intimately linked here: first, That then is love by Philip Rosseter (1568-1623) to. text by Thomas Campion (1587-1620) - who indeed provides the next song, I care not for these ladies. Lutenist to King James I, That then is love is typical of Rosseter in its generally  chordal setting; this came across as one of the loveliest songs of the recital, with Campion’s I care not for these ladies (from A Booke of Ayres) a livelier companion, finding Chance and Carr back in storytelling mode over Campion's gently lilting lute. A Gallliard by Rosseter acted as bridge. 

Back to Dowland; the astonishing Time Stands Still from the 1603 Third Book of Songs. Time did, too; the fantasy for lute, A Fancy, P 6, seemed like a gentle awakening (this appears to be the piece Havergal Brian riffed on in his Prelude, ‘John Dowland’s Fancy’ incidentally). Dear if you change was full of beauty; Come away, come sweet love full of that metric and rhythmic cleverness that so enlivens Dowland’s music. 

Any examination of love and loss could not survive without some Purcell, who after all gave us ‘Dido’s Lament,’ one of the finest exemplars of that concept ever. Here, it was One charming night, from Purcell’s Fairy Queen (a piece heard in its entirety just last year at Thaxted: review). Pure magic here; as was ‘By beauteous softness,’ a gentle unveiling. 

Good to have some John Eccles (his haunting Aire) before the famous Sweeter than Roses, Z 595, potent in its intimacy, and also a fine vehicle to show the freedom of Chance’s voice. Purcell and Blow seem to go hand in hand. Blow set a text by Nathaniel Lee, Lovely Selina, a tale of a maiden content in her maidenhood. But Gods disagree, and send a suitor, 'a gentle youth, born to persuade'. A song of the tortures of love ('Pity, ye Gods, if e’er you know what ‘tis to be in love’), its sense of Acadian melancholy seemed to sum up the entire recital. The text is available here.  

Just one exiting from the Elizabehan era, and offered in the manner of a programmed encore: by Cynthia Harper (born 1945), My love gave me an apple, for unaccompanied voice. It is utterly timeless, like a folk song. Words are by Harper though, and there is something of a spiritual aspect (her four-part version is actually subtitled ‘a Celtic blessing’). 

An unforgettable recital: place, music and performance in perfect congruence. 

Chance and Carr's disc is available on Amazon here.