In centenary years, homage is paid to a composer, and then we tend to move on, leaving the musician more or less where he or she always was. Not so with John Dowland. The 400th anniversary of the publication of his seven Lachrimae, musical icons of the late 16th-century cult of melancholy, has yielded performances and recordings which kindled new and still regenerating enthusiasm for one of the greatest songwriters England has ever produced. Even Sting has made his mark.

One of the most inspired and lasting acts of homage was that offered by the chamber group Concordia and the Cheltenham Festival which, in 2004, commissioned a set of seven new Lachrimae from seven British composers. A concert of Dowland's originals, interwoven with three of Concordia's favourite commissions, filled the Wigmore Hall.

Dowland subtitled his set of exquisite reworkings of the single Lachrimae melody, “Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans”. And Concordia's gently breathed, beautifully focused playing revealed the sighs, the tears and the sensuality of Dowland. A consort of five viols (led by Mark Levy) and a single lute (Elizabeth Kenny) let the delicious dissonances slip into place, never over-arguing their case and never failing to find the last flicker of an echoing phrase or melodic fragment.

In between, Robin Blaze tuned his velveteen countertenor to consort songs and lute ayres by William Byrd and Dowland himself. And the new works? Gavin Bryars's Lachrimae Crepusculae was a dance of dark bass shadows and reverberations; and John Tavener's Lachrymae contrived a dialogue between a Purcellian canon and a snatch of the Lachrymosa from Mozart's Requiem. But the work that will continue to haunt me was Adrian Williams's wonderful Teares to Dreames, a long-pondered and long-assimilated reinvention of Dowland's muse - fragile, elusive, yet robustly organic in its making.

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