Martin Best


Martin Best is an English singer, lutenist, guitarist, and composer. Best has been active mainly in early music including Renaissance music, minstrel songs and the French troubadour traditions, in works related to Shakespeare, such as the sonnets and music to Shakespeare plays, and also in songs of the Swedish ballad tradition. He has often performed in constellations named Martin Best Consort and Martin Best Medieval Ensemble.
Best got a position at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid 1960s and remained associated with them for over 30 years as an actor-singer, musician and composer.
His first works in the Swedish ballad tradition were the songs of Carl Michael Bellman, Sweden's unofficial national poet, who is sometimes considered the starting point of the Swedish ballad tradition. Best recorded three albums with Bellman's songs, mainly from the song collections Fredman's Epistles in translations by Paul Britten Austin, with some additions from Fredman's Songs as well as other Bellman works: To Carl Michael with Love, Bellman in Britain, and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman. Songs from the two first albums were later collected on a CD, also named To Carl Michael with Love. Göran Forsling wrote that "With his flexible voice and his masterly treatment of the guitar and the cyster, the latter a lute-like instrument that Bellman also played, is a worthy transmitter of the Bellman tradition." Forsling notes that Sven-Bertil Taube and Fred Åkerström gave Bellman's songs a new, earthy realism ideal for the 20th century, but argues that Best is closer to how Bellman must have sounded, "though not theatrical enough if the ear-witnesses' are to be relied on. He is fresh and lively, his diction is excellent and his rhythmic acuity is striking."
Other Swedish song poets performed by Best include Birger Sjöberg, with one album released in 1979.

Discography

Original recordings. Years are release years, when such have been available.