As a pseudo-tragic twentysomething living in Berkeley in 1990 and 1991, I used to listen for days on end to the Lachrimae of John Dowland. Jordi Savall's recording, devastating to a fault, is the saddest hour of sound I know. Even the dances have a morbid air, a whiff of Jacobean death. I find this music hard to listen to now — it's like re-reading certain drunken late-night letters I never mailed. Instead, I put on Poulenc in the morning.
