For musicians, the excitement about the recovery of King Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose was that it contained some very interesting musical instruments, not least what is almost certainly the only surviving example of that instrument so often found in early descriptions of music-making, the doucaine. The present record takes its title by using modern copies of two of the Mary Rose instruments, the drone-fiddle and the three-hole pipe. Neither is used much, however, and their use is indicated in only the most indirect way. (To find them, you would do best to begin with the last track where they appear prominently.) Very little of the music on this record would be well served by either.
So perhaps the subtitle of the record is nearer to the mark: ''Tudor Court Music from the Time of the Mary Rose''. Well, up to a point. Quite a lot of the pieces were certainly composed at least 15 years after the ship had sunk, and several more hardly count as 'Tudor court music' except in the sense that if they had been heard at the court of Henry VIII they would have seemed sensible additions to the repertory. By and large, the first half is of music from English manuscripts, particularly King Henry VIII's Book, and the second half focuses more on continental works. Strictly speaking, then, this is an anthology of (mostly) early sixteenthsecular music with a heavy English bias.
But it is in many ways an extremely pleasing anthology. Emily Van Evera does all the singing and shows a fine range of gentle but musical approaches in these mostly rather slight pieces. Christopher Wilson produces some characteristically wonderful and vital playing on lute and guitar—particularly in Guillaume Morlaye's infectious Hornepype d'Angleterre and a ricercar by Capirola. Andrew Lawrence-King on the harp is in excellent form playing Arthurs Dumpe by Philip van Wilder. Several of the more courtly songs suffer from the use of a recorder on the tenor line, thus playing in the wrong octave to the disadvantage of the carefully composed polyphony. Nevertheless, there is a spirit of wistful lightness about the record that makes it undeniably welcome.'