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Christopher Goodwin, Lutes of fire, Early Music, Volume 36, Issue 2, May 2008, Pages 325–327, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/can005
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In the mid-16th century virtuosity on the lute seems to have been identified with the ability to play very, very fast. Towards the end of the century, the succeeding generation of lute players (Dowland's generation) sought a more lyrical style, and disdained the pyrotechnics of their predecessors. Thomas Robinson wrote in 1603 that ‘in older times they strove [only] to have a quick hand upon the lute, to run, hurry hurry, keeping a cat in the gutter upon the ground, now true, now false, now up, now down’. The duets from the two lute books of Giovanni Antonio Terzi (1593 and 1599) represented the last manifestation in print of this tradition of frenetic division-making, and are among the very hardest to play. Michael Niessen and David van Ooijen perform twelve of these fiendishly difficult duets on Terzi: Un'altra canzone (Turtle Records TRSA0028, rec 2004, 49′) with so much skill that they make them sound easy—and with such energy and panache that Thomas Robinson's criticism seems curmudgeonly indeed. Terzi intabulated the popular standards of the day (madrigals and chansons by Willaert, Marenzio, Palestrina, Lassus, Striggio and others) and added running divisions in a second part; these have to be played very fast if the madrigal-ground is still to make musical sense. Close miking, crystalline recorded sound, and a full-blooded, sometimes brash playing style and timbre add to the excitement. This is electrifying stuff.
