With the harp increasingly used as a continuo instrument in recent decades, the sweet but deeply touching sound world conjured by this disc is perhaps a less strange and exotic one than it used to be. But that should not prevent you from stopping in your tracks when you encounter (or even re-encounter) William Lawes’s consort suites for ‘the Harpe, Base Violl, Violin, and Theorbo’. Here the harp is an obbligato instrument with delicate lines of its own to contribute to the three- or four-part contrapuntal texture, with results that are exquisite to the ear. These performances by a multi-national quartet certainly capture the inscrutably comforting atmosphere of lyrical melancholy that underlies most of the finest English music but which seems to have reached a height in the century of Dowland and Hamlet, when the pieces were composed (they almost certainly date from the 1630s). Sit by the fire and listen to this CD on a darkening autumn evening and you’ll soon feel the mellowness sinking in.

Richness too. Lawes was not only a master of harmonic resource and complex melodic structure – as he shows here in two large and masterful Pavans – but of rhythm that is both exciting and controlled, revealed at its best in his Corantos and (fast) Sarabands. These pieces may not have the striking expressive extremism of some of Lawes’s viol consorts but they are always satisfying and always interesting, and it is hard to imagine them better served than by the glowingly transparent and thoughtful performances they receive here. Interspersed with them come a number of dance movements for solo lyra viol, performed with no less an awareness of their sense of serious beauty by Philippe Pierlot. This is an unassuming disc which has somehow taken six years to be released but it is one that offers profound pleasures.