Dowland, John/Purcell, Henry: Orpheus In England (Bis Audio CD)

Emma Kirkby and Jakob Lindberg have devised a programme which takes in a wide spectrum of emotions: from the pastoral joyfulness of By a fountain and the melancholy of In darkness let me dwell, we are led via the desperation and drama of Bess of Bedlam to the conviction expressed in Music for a while that music has the power to vanquish even death.

Interspersing the songs are lute solos, including Dowland’s immortal Lachrimae, but also Lindberg’s own transcriptions of Purcell pieces such as The Cibell and the Echo Dance of the Furies from Dido and Aeneas, performed on Lindberg’s unique four-hundred year old instrument. Kirkby and Lindberg are musical partners of long standing, with earlier collaborations on BIS including Musique and Sweet Poetrie (BIS-SACD-1505), a survey of the lute song across Europe around the year 1600.

‘A grand tour conducted by a pair of ideal guides’ was how the reviewer in Gramophone described that disc, while his colleague in International Record Review found that the ‘undeniably glorious performances’ made the disc ‘a journey well worth making’.