Perhaps the first thing to say about the music on this record is that none of it should be taken too seriously. Above all this was music for relaxation, social music for the diversion of the aristocracy and the upper-middle classes. The recorder was ideally suited to the modest musical and technical abilities of gentlemanly amateurs, whose tastes were catered for in the many manuals and tune collections which began to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century with titles such as ''The Most Pleasant Companion'' and ''The Complete Flute Master''. Easy to transport, and comparatively easy to play, the recorder proved to be the ideal musical component of that Arcadian society captured in so much eighteenth-century English art.
It is the simpler tunes from the collections that make up the first side of this record. They are attractively played (Hans-Martin Linde produces a muscular sound, has a good sense of style, and is sensitively accompanied), but the arrangements of pieces from the ''Fitzwilliam Virginal Book'' are misconceived. It is true that there was some exchange between different repertories in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but many of the pieces in the Fitzwilliam book display highly idiomatic keyboard figuration which does not translate effectively into another medium. Linde's solution, which is to leave out many of the ornaments so characteristic of the style, results in some rather ghostly and emaciated versions (as in Byrd's Callini Casturame). The contents of the second side are more successful from every point of view; the technical demands are greater (reflecting a growing taste in eighteenth-century London for professional performances by virtuosos), and to these pieces Linde brings a quite breathless fluency that delights and charms. This is altogether music of more substance, both from the point of view of the material and from that of the total sound, with some discreet and effective underpinning from viola da gamba and harpsichord. The harpsichord is bright without being harsh, and the gamba soothingly mellow; the engineers have admirably caught the intimacy of these pieces, the impression (as Roger North described musical evenings) of ''sitting in a pleasant cool air in a temperate summer evening''.'