Album: Joel Frederiksen, Requiem for a Pink Moon (Harmonia Mundi

There's been increasing traffic between the folk and classical fields of late, though it's rare for a contemporary songwriter to be the focus, as in this "Elizabethan Tribute to Nick Drake".

Using a period palette of lute, archlute, viola da gamba and theorbo, lutenist Joel Frederiksen and his Ensemble here unearth links between the songwriter and his Elizabethan precursors, notably John Dowland: the sequence shifting from Drake's "Rider on the Wheel" through Dowland's "Time Stands Still" to Drake's "Time Has Told Me" works both thematically and musically, despite the difference of Frederiksen and Timothy Leigh Evans's courtly vocal manner from Drake's original air of resignation.

Download: Pink Moon; Rider on the Wheel; Time Stands Still; Time Has Told Me