‘I honestly don’t think it had occurred to anyone that a solo theorbo concerto would be possible’

It’s a curious quirk of the modern age that the most important musical instrument of the Renaissance is having, well, a renaissance. On YouTube, a video of a lute prelude and allemande by the 17th-century French composer Robert de Visée has clocked up almost a million views. On Spotify, almost 15,000 people subscribe to the playlist ‘Lute Music for Alchemists’ – featuring such blockbuster composers as, ahem, Alessandro Piccinini, Alonso Mudarra and Cuthbert Hely. Meanwhile, on the same platform, British lutenist Matthew Wadsworth has well over 16,000 listeners loyally streaming his tracks each month. These may be small numbers compared to superstars of the violin and piano, let alone the pop world, but they are not insignificant: digital technology is enabling a whole new generation to discover this gem of an instrument and its exquisite repertoire.

While there are no doubt some lute purists out there who would turn their noses up at the idea of millennial hipsters selecting Dowland for a Dalston dinner party, Wadsworth is delighted by the resurgence of interest in what has been, over the past couple of centuries, a relatively niche musical pursuit. ‘I’m astonished by the number of monthly listeners I get,’ he tells me. ‘Streaming is an incredible way to discover new music, and stuff that you just wouldn’t otherwise find. If you get featured on a playlist, that gives you incredible exposure. So I’m all for it! We have to embrace new ways of doing things: the technology is there and it’s not going anywhere. I’m happy for my music to reach anybody.’

For the previously uninitiated, one of the great revelations of the lute is the quietly meditative beauty of its sound. ‘What the lute does, and what it gives you as an artist, is the chance to draw people in,’ Wadsworth agrees. ‘It’s not a loud sound like the trombone or the piano: it’s very delicate, nuanced. But I see a concert as a collective listening experience: it’s not me playing “to” an audience, it’s all of us listening to this sound that I’m making through the instrument. You’re not aiming to make this big sound and project to the back of the hall: you need to draw people into your world. For me that’s the magic.’ He mentions the legendary musician Andrés Segovia, who once said about the guitar that ‘it’s like looking down binoculars the wrong way round’. ‘I think the lute’s almost like looking down a telescope the wrong way around,’ Wadsworth muses. ‘Once you get into that world, a whole range of colour, texture and timbre is revealed and it touches people, it really does.’

It was ‘completely by accident’ that Wadsworth, who was born in Manchester in 1974 and was the first blind student to attend Chetham’s School of Music, began playing the lute. Aged six, he’d started on the acoustic guitar and by his teens had branched out into the electric guitar. ‘I went to Chets and then on to the Royal Academy as a guitarist, but I often found I was drawn to transcriptions of original lute repertoire. Of course I was also playing core guitar repertoire like Villa-Lobos, but there was just something about that earlier music, the likes of Dowland and Bach, that really spoke to me. But I never, ever would have imagined I would come out the other side as a lute player.’

It was the chance remark of an old school friend, who asked if he would
be up for playing the theorbo during a performance of an amateur production of Blow’s Venus and Adonis, that altered the course of Wadsworth’s life. The Academy, it turned out, owned one; curious, he
went to investigate. ‘My first reaction was: “I can’t do this, there are just too many strings, it’s doing my head in”,’ he chuckles. ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing but I taught myself the basics.’ It is at this point that I feel I should admit my own ignorance when it comes to the lute family, of which the theorbo, with its extended neck and second pegbox, is a particularly magnificent member, and he breaks off our conversation to explain the mechanics of courses, fretted strings and so-called ‘re-entrant’ tuning, in which the strings are not ordered from the lowest to the highest
pitch (or vice versa). ‘At the beginning, it messes with your mind,’ he grins, ‘but once you get used to it, it’s beautiful.’

‘Going from the guitar to the lute was like going from a lake to an ocean!’

Guitar playing is largely a solitary pursuit, but these newly acquired theorbo skills gave Wadsworth the chance to play chamber music for the first time. ‘I loved it, immediately,’ he says: ‘I loved the playing with other people, and above all I loved the music.’ Seventeenth-century repertoire such as Monteverdi, he explains, offered ‘an element of improvisation. And there was something I relished about that structured freedom. Going from the guitar, with its relatively limited repertoire, to this – it was like going from a lake to an ocean!’

Not that the decision to relinquish the guitar came easily. The challenges were intellectual, emotional and physical. Wadsworth had to work painstakingly with lute scholar Tim Crawford, as well as computer developers, to develop a braille system of lute tablature, which did not yet exist. And he talks movingly about the moment in 1995, at the end of his second year as an undergraduate, having been juggling both lute and guitar for about six months, when he finally cut off his fingernails. ‘It sounds trivial, but it’s dramatic to have to chop your nails off,’ he admits. ‘As a classical guitarist you’ve spent most of your life looking after these nails, and that is your sound: you know when you cut them off, that’s it, you can’t play the guitar any more. I felt awful, I didn’t really know what my identity was anymore.’ Ultimately, though, ‘the lute chose me. The feeling was just too strong.’

Wadsworth’s forthcoming album with his group, Unmeasured, is due for release in September and it’s a sonic love letter to the glorious 17th-century sound world in which, he says, he has ‘lived for years. Different music speaks to us in different ways; this is the space that I mostly occupy — and that occupies me.’ Musica Transalpina features violin sonatas by Schmelzer, Uccellini, Pandolfi, Marini, Castello and Bertali played, intriguingly, by three violinists: Kati Debretzeni, Cecilia Bernardini and Huw Daniel, accompanied by Wadsworth on theorbo and Christopher Bucknall on harpsichord and chamber organ. ‘This style of music can be played in many different ways, and I like that we have got three contrasting sound worlds with the three players,’ he says. ‘It’s also very difficult to record these works as they are such “performance” pieces, so no two takes are alike.’

The ensemble’s name, he explains, partly takes its influence from the ‘unmeasured’ nature of much of 17th-century music — toccatas, preludes and so on — but it also refers ‘to the “unmeasured” power of music itself.’ Wadsworth himself is an authentic and unpretentious advocate for such power. As well as becoming an exemplar of the 17th-century period, he has been a major driver for the expansion of the repertoire. His previous album, Late Night Lute, features an ambitious solo work commissioned by guitarist John Williams on behalf of Wadsworth from composer Stephen Goss. Based on Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, it was broadcast in concert from Wigmore Hall on BBC Radio 3 and has been a terrific success.

Now Wadsworth is collaborating with Goss on a long-held dream. ‘It came to me one day: what about a solo theorbo concerto? Nobody’s ever done it.’ Why? ‘I honestly don’t think it had occurred to anyone that it might be possible,’ he reckons, ‘Which is bizarre as it has pretty much the same compass as a cello.’ He adds, mischievously: ‘My next project is to steal a few cello concertos!’ Meanwhile, the new work, which receives its premiere this summer in Hong Kong, is fiendishly demanding. ‘It pushes me way out of my comfort zone, but that’s what I was hoping for: I wanted a piece that would stretch me, make me grow. My aim – and this is what Stephen has done – was very much to keep the chamber music textures of the instrument while also writing some very virtuosic passages; to show that the theorbo can be a solo star.’

In performance, the instrument will be amplified through a microphone, small pre-amp and PA system, a technical set-up that took Wadsworth and his collaborators over a year of research to get right. ‘Interestingly, it’s opened up a lot of venue possibilities for me’, he says. ‘The beauty of the lute is that it’s hard to hear, but you should be able to hear it. I’ve been to lots of concerts where you leave so disappointed you feel like asking for your money back. Of course you’ve got to get the balance right, but I want it to be a bit more accessible, and if this means we can play in places we otherwise wouldn’t get to and reach new audiences, well, personally I think that’s awesome.’ Is he worried about what the purists will make of it? ‘There are probably people who are going to hate this concerto because they think there shouldn’t be such a thing as modern music for the lute or theorbo.’ He smiles. ‘My take is: these instruments have a past, they have a present. They have to have a future.’

Matthew Wadsworth’s new album is out on the Deux-Elles label this September