The lute master Nicolas Vallet (c.1583–c.1642) lived and worked in a borderland between musical categories. The first three decades of his life were spent in France, then his musical career and published compositions unfolded in Amsterdam. Widely acknowledged as a lute and dance teacher in the Netherlands, he also won fame as one of the most important and prolific authors of sacred music for his instrument, making lute settings of the Calvinist psalms from the Genevan Psalter.

Vallet lived when the lute was undergoing significant changes in terms of tuning, right hand technique and predominant genres, with the impulse for some of these changes coming from his French compatriots. Yet he demonstrates that the older Renaissance approaches towards both composition and performance are still relevant. An impressive part of his repertoire comprises contrapuntal preludes and fantasias following the manner of the masters of previous generations, in which various thematic motives and complex abstract forms are woven into the polyphonic texture. At the same time his lute collections include vast variety of dances, some of which were just entering the performance practice of the time, such as the Sarabande and Bourée. The volume Regia Pietas is entirely dedicated to Protestant (Calvinist) sacred music intabulated for lute solo. Most of the psalms are arranged in two parts. Vallet’s main approaches to these chants is to either develop them as a set of variations or provide them a contrapuntal treatment. This shows that Vallet’s output covers the three instrumental genres of the Renaissance: free abstract pieces (preludes and fantasias), dances and settings of vocal pieces.

For this recording a ten-course lute is used, strung in gut at 415 Hz. This type of gut stringing considerably affects the overall sound of the lute, its resonance and sonority, hopefully bringing the lute a bit closer to what one might imagine as an ‘original’ sound of the time.