John Potter

Amores Pasados is the singer John Potter's attempt to bridge the gap between art song and pop song. He asked three songwriters from rock, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Tony Banks of Genesis and Sting, for new lute songs. These are heard beside lute songs by Thomas Campion, settings by Peter Warlock and E. J. Moeran, and music by the Renaissance composer Picforth. As Potter explains in his notes, setting existing poetry in a familiar genre meant the singers "wouldn't need to pretend to be pop singers".

Potter, formerly a tenor of the Hilliard Ensemble and of Red Byrd, shares the singing with Anna Maria Friman of Trio Mediaeval, who also plays Hardanger fiddle. The two lutenists are Ariel Abramovich and Jacob Heringman. The arrangements took their final shape during the sessions at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in November 2014. Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered the recording and Manfred Eicher produced it for ECM.

Jones's three Spanish settings, on poems by Lope de Vega, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and an anonymous author, were first written about a quarter-century earlier for Red Byrd. Here they are rearranged for two voices and two lutes, with close harmony in No dormía. Banks set two Campion poems, Follow thy fair sun and The cypress curtain of the night. Each is heard next to Campion's own setting, so the old and new versions can be compared directly. Sting's Bury me deep in the greenwood, on his own words, was first intended for the film Robin Hood and closes the disc. Picforth's In nomine, the only piece known by him, appears twice as an interlude.

Graham Rickson of The Arts Desk found the Campion settings well performed but wrote that "the real surprises are a pair of songs by Warlock and Moeran", and called the album "unexpectedly delightful". In Sequenza 21, Christian Carey noted that the singers "make no pretense to be pop singers, performing with classically trained singers' diction and tone". BBC Music Magazine gave the album four stars.

This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM New Series 2441, first released in June 2015, with Potter's liner notes in the booklet.