It is not uncommon to find Benjamin Britten and John Dowland in the same classical guitar recital. It is less common to find contemporary music in a lute recital, though Matthew Wadsworth’s ‘Late Night Lute Music’, featuring Stephen Goss’s The Miller’s Tale along with some Dowland (Deux Elles, 8/17), springs to mind.

This is different: a recital of night-themed lute pieces by 16th-century English composers, plus a small set of anonymous arrangements of Scottish tunes for mandora performed on a soprano lute, in which Jakob Lindberg’s arrangement for eight-course lute of Britten’s Nocturnal after Dowland’s lute song Come Heavy Sleep takes centre stage.

In a booklet note, Lindberg tells us he was working on the Nocturnal during his final year as a classical guitarist before switching to Baroque guitar and lute: ‘This piece was one of the works I loved the best on the guitar and I abandoned it with some regret.’ He resumes that abandoned project here. There’s something dark about Britten’s musical meditation on Dowland’s song. ‘Come, heavy Sleep, the image of true Death’, as the lyrics go. But to find it on the lute, with that instrument’s tenebrous evocations of a long-dead world, is to experience something more complex.

It’s not just hearing anew the shifting moods of the sections – very agitated, restless, uneasy and so forth – heading towards a seemingly relentless passacaglia that finally yields to the repose of Dowland’s original melody and harmonies. It’s Lindberg’s playing, subtle and penetrating, as he so successfully teases out that peculiar melancholy Dowland and Britten clearly shared. This is a wholly new vision of a masterpiece.