Featured Album November 2026: Michał Gondko & Nigel North "Ophelia's Garden"

It's November, which for our team means only one thing – we're off to the London International Festival of Early Music! Alongside the exhibition, world-class concerts take place throughout the festival and one of this year's performances is a solo recital from internationally-renowned lutenist Nigel North. Earlier this year, Nigel released a highly-anticipated duo album with fellow lutenist Michał Gondko, a celebration of English music from the Renaissance to the contemporary on a matching pair of 8-course lutes after Venere, commissioned from Malcolm Prior especially for this project. Available now on Deux-Elles, read on to find out more about this special collaboration...

Ophelia's Garden: English Lute Duets
Michał Gondko & Nigel North

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR NOVEMBER 2026

Click here to order now!

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From the artist's press release:

Ophelia’s Garden is the much anticipated duo album of two of our finest lutenists, Michał Gondko and Nigel North, exquisitely recorded in the glorious acoustic of St Andrew's Toddington. It features popular lute duets from Elizabethan England by John Dowland, John Johnson, Thomas Robinson and their contemporaries, in new arrangements and reconstructions by Nigel North. The title piece of the album, Ophelia’s Garden, is a new lute duet by Welsh composer Stephen Goss, based on Ophelia’s harrowing mad scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet.These pieces, old and new, will delight the listener as much today as they did 400 years ago.

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Ophelia's Garden":

British lutenist Nigel North has been performing, teaching, editing and arranging music, and writing about the lute for more than 50 years. If that doesn’t deserve him some kind of gong, then I don’t know what does. He’s an iconic figure, at the centre of all things lute. Polish-born Michał Gondko is one of the leading lutenists of his generation who has been particularly fascinated by European polyphonic art music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Together, Gondko and North regularly perform lute duets and this much anticipated CD celebrates that partnership. Playing on a pair of specially commissioned 8-course Renaissance lutes by Norfolk-based luthier Malcolm Prior championed by North, the CD is as much a showcase for Prior’s craftsmanship as a maker as it is for Gondko and North’s skills as players.

As North explains in his liner notes which wear their scholarship lightly, lute duets were part of Italian musical life from the 15th century. In England, the most accepted way of combining two lutes was a practice known as the Treble and Ground, in which one lute played a melodic line (often decorated with fast divisions), with the other lute providing the harmonic accompaniment. In Elizabethan England this was music for the home, dancing at court and as entertainment. Other lute duet forms were what can be termed ‘equal’ duets: a contrapuntal genre from both lutes, with much joshing between the lutes; and a genre in which pre-existing solo pieces had a second part added to it.

Music by many of the usual suspects can be found in the delightful disc – Dowland, of course, but also John Johnson, Thomas Robinson, Richard Allison and others – with music that is joyful and reflective in turns. Gondko and North frequently swap parts, delighting in each other’s artistry. The album’s title track is from Welsh contemporary composer Stephen Goss’s Ophelia’s Garden (2025), commissioned by Gondko and North. It is based on Ophelia’s speech in Act IV scene 5 of Hamlet, with each section of this through-composed piece being based on one of the flowers Ophelia mentions: ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember…’.

Recorded in the warm acoustic of St Andrew’s, Toddington, this CD is a pleasure from start to finish. Warmly recommended.

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Ophelia's Garden is available from The Early Music Shop online or in-store!

Click here to order now!

Click below to watch Michał Gondko & Nigel North perform the title track of the album, commissioned for them from composer Stephen Goss: