Martin Best

Martin Best, born on 13 April 1942, is an English singer, lutenist, guitarist, and composer whose work has centered on early music, including Renaissance music, minstrel songs, the French troubadour tradition, and the Swedish ballad tradition. He has also devoted significant attention to music connected with Shakespeare, encompassing settings of the sonnets and songs from Shakespeare's plays. Best has performed and recorded under the ensemble names Martin Best Consort and Martin Best Medieval Ensemble.

Best joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1960s, working as an actor-singer, musician, and composer, and maintained that association for more than thirty years. His Broadway appearance came in 1971, when he performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The production reflected the intersection of Shakespeare and music that defined much of his professional life.

His engagement with the Swedish ballad tradition began with the songs of Carl Michael Bellman, Sweden's unofficial national poet and a figure often regarded as the tradition's originator. Best recorded three albums of Bellman's material, drawing primarily from the song collections Fredman's Epistles in translations by Paul Britten Austin, with additional selections from Fredman's Songs and other Bellman works. Those albums were To Carl Michael with Love, released in 1975, Bellman in Britain in 1978, and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman in 1983, the last a solo recording featuring voice, guitar, and cittern. Songs from the first two albums were later compiled on a CD also titled To Carl Michael with Love. Critic Göran Forsling observed that Best's flexible voice and his command of both guitar and the cyster, a lute-like instrument that Bellman himself played, made him a worthy transmitter of the Bellman tradition, noting his fresh delivery, excellent diction, and striking rhythmic precision. Best also recorded an album in 1979 devoted to the songs of Swedish poet Birger Sjöberg.

His recordings in the troubadour and medieval traditions were extensive. The Dawn of Romance, released in 1978, presented songs and music of the early troubadours of Provence. Subsequent releases under the Martin Best Medieval Ensemble included The Last of the Troubadours, focused on the art and times of Guiraut Riquier; The Dante Troubadours, featuring French ballads by Bertran de Born, Guiraut de Bornelh, and others; Songs of Chivalry, with works by Thibaut de Navarre among others; and The Testament of Tristan, released in 1987, presenting songs of Bernart de Ventadorn. The ensemble also recorded Cantigas of Santa Maria of Alfonso X El Sabio and Forgotten Provence, covering music-making in the south of France from 1150 to 1550. Several of these recordings were later gathered into the 1999 CD box set Music from the Age of Chivalry.

Best's Shakespeare-related recordings include William Shakespeare: Ages of Song, released in 1979, which drew on songs from Shakespeare's plays, and a 1990–1991 collaboration with Nils Lindberg, Lena Willemark, the Fresk Quartet, and the Swedish Radio Choir titled O Mistress Mine: A Garland of Elizabethan Poetry, which featured Shakespeare and related material. Earlier in his discography, The Warwickshire Lad, released in 1974 under the Martin Best Consort, also reflected his sustained connection to Shakespeare's world.

Among his other recordings are The Art of the Minstrel, a collaboration with Edward Flower released by 1972 at the latest; Sense and Nonsense, a 1976 album of songs and rhymes for children recorded with actress Peggy Ashcroft; The Fine Old English Tory Times, a 1976 collection of English eighteenth-century ballads; The Pirate's Serenade, also from 1976; Knight On the Road, a 1977 solo album featuring amplified instruments; and Amor de Lonh, a recording under the Martin Best Consort devoted to the distant love poetry of the troubadours.