Expressed in music, the idea of human happiness at a time when lives were generally brutish and short never ceases to amaze.

John Dowland's six decades were a reasonable pitch beyond the norm but in him is reflected the bleakness of the age as well as its triumphalism.

Someone has said waggishly that it was a wonder the Elizabethans managed to get an Armada together, considering the state of melancholy induced by their intimacies and obsessions, compounded in Dowland’s case by personal issues.

Apart from considerations of Time’s winged chariot and the pangs of love unrequited, thwarted or forfeited, Dowland was attending to the more practical matter of taking the art of song forwards.

But his brilliant innovations are drowned in tears, as this wonderful concert of his vocal and instrumental music illustrated. These days, of course, a little of it goes a long way.

Dowland’s music might have been waiting for an Ian Bostridge, not just because the celebrated high tenor brings to it a fey quality but also because he can invest the words with some of the emotions that eventually melt so often into despair. In My Thoughts are Winged with Hopes, there’s a lot going on in the narrator’s relationship with Cynthia, who once ‘shone’ but not now.

The miracle of Bostridge's performances, therefore, lies in his way of indicating that a range of sentiments are at work in these songs and that their musical density and ultimate helplessness are presaged by a deal of self-questioning. Although 'light doth but shame disclose' - a line from the pitiable Flow My Tears - implies a an inevitable acceptance of darkness, it also illustrates a narrator who is fighting for what will ultimately sink in a slough of despond.

Dowland suffers in his popular appeal today from the notion that his louring sentiments were but a part of what was otherwise jolly and bright. Listening to a couple of hours of his music, with instrumental galiards and lachrimae played by a consort of viols (Fretwork) and the lutenist Elizabeth Kenny and interspersed among the lute-accompanied songs, one realises that court entertainment was were performed by candlelight. How much Dowland must have watched those candles slowly going out.

Fretwork and Kenny provided the pool of sound in which this courtly music swims so beautifully but so unavailingly. In musical history terms, it needed reviving.