Michał Gondko & Nigel North • Ophelia's Garden (CD)
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•• OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR NOVEMBER 2026 ••
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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, willdelight the listener as much today as they did 400 years ago.
Michał Gondko is founder and artistic co-director of La Morra, an ensemble widely recognised for its renditions of the late medieval and early Renaissance repertoire, as confirmed by such marks of musical distinction as the Diapason d’Or, the Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award, as well as Gramophone and International Classical Music Award nominations. He is also in demand as soloist and regularly performs lute duets with Nigel North. Concert tours have taken him to most European countries, as well as to the USA, the countries of the Middle East, China and Japan.
Born in London, England, Nigel North has been Professor of Lute at the Historical Performance Institute (formerly Early Music Institute), Indiana University, Bloomington (USA) 1999-2024, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London (1976-1995), Hochschule der Künste, Berlin (1993-1999) and the Royal Conservatory, Den Haag (2006-2009). Nigel wrote Continuo Playing on the Lute, Archlute and Theorbo (Faber, 1986 and Indiana University Press). More recently in 2024, Le Luth Doré (Paris) published Bach on the Lute, Volumes 1 & 2 (transcriptions for baroque lute of BWV 1001-1006, 1007-1012 and the complete works for lute, BWV 999-1006a). In 2026, Playing with Patterns on the Lute: A Study and Method for Playing Sixteenth- Century Divisions (Oxford University Press) and a new edition of the complete lute works of John Dowland (Le Luth Doré).
DXL1224 • Released 2026