Once upon a time, when the world was much quieter, the lute was the premier, princely instrumental voice -- intimate, complex and expressive, ideal for accompanying songs and dances or for playing solo. Not long after Bach and Vivaldi's day, though, the lute was overwhelmed by the noise of incipient modernity.

Playing the lute today requires the soul of a poet and the curiosity of a scientist. It seemed apt that Hopkinson Smith, one of the world's rare masters of the lute, would perform at Fine Hall's Taplin Auditorium on the Princeton University Campus. Walking the Fine corridors at intermission, one could see blackboards filled with the equations of higher mathematics, as Greek to most people as the antique manuscripts Smith pores through for his repertoire.

Cultured and confident in his way but shyly soft-spoken, the 58-year-old Smith seems every inch the poet-scientist. The New York-born, Harvard-trained sage of many archaic plucked instruments now resides in Switzerland, where he teaches at Basel's Schola Cantorum, a hallowed academy for early music. Smith's more than 20 solo recordings -- of Milan, Gallot, Weiss, Bach -- are like an illuminated manuscript in sound, articulating a whole world of ancient scores, abstruse techniques and deep, timeless emotions.

Smith's recital last year at Taplin featured the works of iconic Elizabethan composer-lutenist John Dowland (the subject of his latest Naïve recording). He debuted a new, old program on Wednesday, playing the Renaissance lute -- smaller and simpler than the instrument's Baroque version -- in French and Italian music of the 15th and 16th centuries. Through eyeglasses sliding down his nose, Smith peered at sheet music laid across a low table covered by the green-and-gold scarf that he uses to swaddle his instrument in its case. The sight was unassuming and personable, yet the sound was magical and transporting.

In one of his courtly spoken preludes to the various sections of the program, Smith described the Fantasias of Francesco da Milano as "extremely humbling to play -- the counterpoint seems to go almost beyond the instrument." Lonely melodies drifted out of the piquant harmony as he played, with the occasional broken note or blurred passage underlining not only Smith's preface but the vulnerable, very human qualities of the lute (and its players). He juxtaposed Francesco's erudition with the earthy dance tunes of Pietro Paolo Borrono. His "Saltarello: Il Pescatore che va Cantando" featured a drone with an open bass note, hinting at the grooves of more contemporary times.

Prior to playing pieces by Albert de Rippe, Smith called him one of the strangest composers of the Renaissance, "a polyphonic wanderer." He said, "Playing some of his music is like entering a forest, getting lost, then coming out in some place you recognize. But you don't know how you got there." Taplin's cosy seating and dry but clear acoustics allowed listeners to follow Smith closely as he traced his deft way through De Rippe's harmonic maze.

Pierre Attaingnant was a Parisian music publisher whose early lute books featured preludes, chansons and dances by many anonymous authors. Rooted in an old folk dance often accompanied by bagpipes, the Attaingnant "Haulberroys" was intoxicating; the beguiling tune cycled around and around, with the different voicings spurred by Smith's shifting fretboard hand evoking a dancer taking a different partner with every turn. Like many of these tunes so big on the Renaissance hit parade, what was once upbeat now sounds melancholy.

Boxing fans call their sport "the sweet science." Perhaps Smith's art, allusive of something virtually forgotten yet strangely resonant, should be termed the bittersweet science.

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[postscript: Below is a 1999 survey of Hopkinson Smith's recordings that I wrote for Tower's Pulse magazine (now defunct), including excerpts from an interview with the lutenist. Note: The Astrée/Auvidis catalog is now controlled by the French company Naïve, distributed in the U.S. by Naxos.]

Hopkinson Smith: Lutenist

"The lute is certainly the most personal of instruments and perhaps the most perfect," said Stravinsky. In the hands of Hopkinson Smith, it is both. To hear him perform Bach or Weiss or Gallot is to hear a conjurer of ideally intimate sounds. He plays the lute like it never went out of style.

New York-born and Harvard-educated, the 52-year-old Smith played the classical guitar in his teens, switching to the lute in college. Studying in Europe with Emilio Pujol and Eugen Dombois, he eventually developed a mastery of all manner of archaic plucked instruments -- Baroque and Renaissance lutes and guitars, the Spanish vihuela, the theorbo. Smith has taught for many years at the renowned Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland, and he has recorded 20 solo albums for the French Astrée label, in addition to many as an original member of Jordi Savall's Hesperion XX.

While Smith extols the plectrum skills of such precursors as Dombois, Walter Gerwig and Julian Bream, he also admires the period cello pioneer Anner Bylsma and golden-age pianist Dinu Lipatti. You can hear Bylsma's mix of scholarliness and spontaneity in Smith's playing, as well as the lapidary imagism of Lipatti.

Smith's sensitive, sonorous touch is on display in his survey of the French Baroque school; his take on the end of that line, Jacques de Gallot (1625-1690), appears on a gravely beautiful 1994 album that Astrée just reissued at midprice in its "Treasures of the Baroque" series (AS128528). And Smith's flawless articulation and vibrant sense of drama are evident in his way with the vihuela literature from 16th-century Spain. His turns on the elegant pavanes of Milan, the more piquant fantasies of Narvaez and the rich ruminations of Mudarra are collected in a mid-priced boxed set reissued last year to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of the Spanish king Philip II (E8623).

In the Teutonic realm lie the twin peaks of the lute, the contemporaries J.S. Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss. The Dresdener Weiss was perhaps the greatest of all performer-composers on the lute, a veritable Baroque Orpheus. "Weiss was a genius," Smith says. "He introduced so many improvisatory modes of expression on the lute, with not only this profusion of notes but a real Italianate cantabile. Of all the star instrumentalists in the Dresden court orchestra, he was the highest paid. That's a testament both to his magnetism as a performer and to the lute's cachet at the time." Smith has dipped into Weiss' vast corpus of compositions (more than 600) with two Astrée discs, the first including the great F minor sonata (E8718) and the most recent with two dramatic partitas (E8620).

Drawn to the famous keyboardist Bach, Weiss became friends with him after a visit in 1739: a legendary summit that included a bout of joint improvisation -- "something musically very fine," reported one lucky witness. According to Smith, even with Weiss' black pearls, "there is no higher art on the lute than Bach's. Weiss was a giant of the instrument, but Bach goes beyond the instrument." Smith covered all of Bach's original works for lute on a two-disc set from the late '80s (E7721), and he followed that up a few years ago with his transcriptions of two of Bach's solo cello suites (E8744).

In time for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death next year, Astrée will release Smith's most ambitious Bach project yet: a two-disc set showcasing his transcriptions of the composer's sonatas and partitas for solo violin. "The violin music lends itself to the lute organically, since there is this suggestion of polyphony throughout," he says. "And these works seem like arrangements to begin with. They sound as if Bach transcribed for the violin music that was written on a higher, more abstract plane."

Beyond the sublimities of Bach, Smith has also immersed himself in lighter fare. His most recent album showcases rarely heard lute concertos from Haydn and such lesser-known 17th-century Austro-Germans as J.F. Fasch and B.J. Hagen. In league with a string quartet led by the fine Chiara Banchini, Smith limns a beguiling songfulness from these works, with a bel canto style that belies the lute's notoriously quick decay (E8641).

As the world became less and less intimate of a place, the lute was gradually retired from its leading role. Yet even though "the lute may not be one of the most contemporary pursuits," Smith says, "it can still have real resonance for people. This isn't elevator music -- it's music to stop and listen to, that can refresh your soul. It is powerful, not in decibels but in expressiveness. The reason the lute still has this iconic aura is because other than the human voice, it is the instrument that speaks most directly from the heart to the heart."