Jenkins is probably the finest English composer for instruments of the mid-seventeenth century, so this recording, which mixes stunning divisions for two bass viols with fantasias and suites for a trio of violin and two basses (with organ), promises well. The sound the Apollo Consort makes is intimate but hardly ever warm, and sustained notes within contrapuntal textures lack shape.
The wit is dry and the melancholy fleeting. Their playing is rhythmically alive, with the fast divisions deftly executed, but the perkiness of the syncopations cannot compensate for a lack throughout the disc of that harmonic tension that is necessary to animate the music. The admirable notes are by the foremost authority on English consort music, Andrew Ashbee.'