Enjoying a lute lunch with the guitarist Michael Butten

© London Intelligence, October 2018

I feel privileged to have lunched today (Thursday, 4 October) with the Italian guitarist Luigi Legnani (1790-1877), the German Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and the British lutenist John Dowland (1553-1626). 

Their 21^stCentury central London medium today is the award-winning British guitarist Michael Butten. Butten's flowing lunchtime recital of pieces from each of those composers fills the air inside the cavernous church hall at St John’s Smith Square in Westminster. In Butten’s accomplished hands, their passionately composed music reverberates with searing clarity down through the centuries. 

Berkshire-born Butten spellbinds around 60 lunchtime concert-goers with Legnani’s majestic and oft-frisky Fantasia in A Op.19. Yet Butten captivates most with his church hall resurrection of Dowland’s Praeludium and Lachrimae Pavane, the latter based perhaps on Dowland’s most famous lute song, Flow My Tears. 

Lost Love

Butten’s Dowland interpretations are moving and evocative, inviting us to hear what Dowland wanted to convey with his soulful 17^thcentury lute compositions. I momentarily close my eyes on Butten to open my ears wider to let this musical poetry fire my imagination. An image appears of a mourner of a lost love. The grieving soul wanders deep through a midwinter forest of England now long gone.

Butten later glides through Bach’s Violin Sonata No.3 in C and richly deserves his echoing ovation inside a church hall that itself echoes England’s past pain; St John’s Smith Square suffered a gutting direct hit from a Luftwaffe bomb on 10 May 1941, the last day of the Blitz. The entire church needed rebuilding.

Butten too seeks to resurrect, as he himself puts it, ‘the often neglected guitar music of British composers’ and the ‘lute repertoire of the British renaissance’, notably Dowland to whom Butten encores in tribute.

Butten’s subtle guitar playing stands alone as extremely good value; and exceptional value at just a tenner for an autumnal lunchtime. 
But it’s worthwhile too to keep an eye on Butten’s noble mission to infuse fresh interest into – what is, essentially - the soul music of 17^thCentury England.

michaelbutten.co.uk

© Paul Coleman, London Intelligence, October 2018