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GRAMOPHONE (04/2017)
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Reviewer: Alexandra Coghlan

 A day in the life of Orpheus – lutenist, lover and plaything of the gods – is the elegant conceit behind this album of 16th- and 17th-century music for voice, lute and viol. In place of traditional booklet-notes for these songs, preludes and dances by William Corkine, John Danyel, Tobias Hume and others, we get a short narrative fantasy, stringing these works together into a musical account of Orpheus’s life, from innocent shepherd songs (‘Come live with me, and be my love’) to his descent to hell after his lost Euridice (‘Go nightly cares’). While musically this journey from youthful innocence to weary despair works well enough, it’s a poor substitute for some context on pieces that are by no means repertoire staples. It’s hard to spend an hour with this recording and not feel renewed admiration for Dowland, whose work (represented here by the smallest handful of his lesser-known songs) stands in such contrast to these pleasant but stylistically anonymous miniatures.

Thomas Hobbs, with his easy and androgynous English tenor, makes an appealing narrator for this musical tale, but it’s the instrumental numbers that really excite. While Corkine may be an undistinguished song-writer, his astonishing music for solo viol – played with gloriously Romantic intensity and virtuosity by Romina Lischka – is as close as this instrument gets to the Bach Cello Suites. Has a solo viol ever sounded quite as operatic as it does here in Corkine’s angst-filled Almaine or duetted as plaintively with a voice as it does in his ‘Down, down, proud mind’? Lischka squeezes every ounce of emotion from works that fulfil a supporting role where they should be square in the spotlight.  

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