How delightful to be again in the company of soprano Ruby Hughes, lutenist Jonas Nordberg and gambist Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann so long after their acclaimed album ‘Heroines of Love and Loss’ (5/17), this time amidst the shades of Dowland, Purcell, Britten et al – and in the company of living composers. It is also fascinating to listen to this album in the wake of last year’s spectacularly good ‘Songs of Passion’ by mezzo Lea Desandre, lutenist Thomas Dunford and Ensemble Jupiter (Erato, A/25), which covers some of the same ground – especially since Hughes and Dunford worked together on the latter’s 2013 debut release for Alpha, ‘Lachrimae’, featuring Dowland’s lute and vocal music.

‘Amidst the Shades’ is necessarily more intimate than these two releases. And yet, shorn of three voices, Dowland’s four-part lute songs grow rather than shrink in dramatic stature. With a more minimalist continuo, Purcell’s songs more piercingly evoke Carissimi’s florid monody. And thanks not only to the seamless stylistic transitions from the Renaissance and Baroque material to the new works but to Hughes’s impossibly pure soprano so tastefully illuminated by lute and viol, every note here floats not in aspic but in aether.

Read the full review at Gramophone.