Shakespearean music that doesn’t just gild the lily

Nowadays more people encounter Shakespeare on-screen than onstage, so the original role of music in his plays—and the kind of music that he intended—usually goes by the wayside. The latest albums by Mignarda and Hathor Consort raise the curtain on what contemporary audiences have been missing.

Mignarda’s Shakespeare’s Lutebook (Prima Classic) features mezzo-soprano Donna Stewart and her husband, the lutenist Ron Andrico. The Hathor Consort’s In My Heart of Hearts: Music in Shakespeare’s Plays (Ramée), in addition to the 10-member ensemble’s virtuosity on Elizabethan-era instruments (viols, Renaissance flute, virginals, etc.), features the soprano Hannah Morrison and the countertenor Marnix De Cat.

The booklets of both albums include lyrics, detailed background information, and performance-choice rationales (which, frankly, they don’t need—the enchanting quality of the music justifies itself).

Mignarda’s 20 selections seek to re-create the experience of encountering these 16th- and 17th-century melodies in intimate indoor settings (“where subtlety and nuance,” the liner notes point out, “might actually be heard”). The close miking emphasizes the delicacy of the musical webs that Andrico spins with his five different lutes as well as the refreshing simplicity and clarity of Stewart’s folk-meets-art-song singing. The composers, when not anonymous, include Shakespeare’s contemporaries William Byrd, Thomas Morley, and Robert Johnson.

Some of the Hathor Consort’s 32 arrangements seem better suited to the indoors too. But, if only because of the number of instruments involved, the consort’s renditions of Thomas Morley’s “My Lord of Oxenford’s Maske,” Anthony Holborne’s “The Night Watch” (with its prominent drumming), and the anonymously composed “Allemana d’amor,” “Ruger,” “Ronda—La represa,” and “Brandenberges—La represa” provide a fuller sound more in keeping with outdoor productions. The singers Morrison and De Cat—who, being operatically inclined, know a thing or two about projection—do too.

As one might expect, the contents overlap somewhat (each includes Desdemona’s “Willow Song” from Othello, Feste’s “O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night, and Ariel’s “Full Fathom Five” from The Tempest). But the differences outweigh the similarities, making the albums more complementary than redundant.

“Let no such man be trusted,” says Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, who “is not moved with concord of sweet sounds.” Perhaps instead of listening to election-year candidates speechify, we should simply require them to listen to Mignarda and the Hathor Consort and observe their reactions instead.