Regular collaborators Perl and Santana are joined by soprano Dorothee Mields and four violists who together with Perl form the Sirius Viols. In her booklet-notes, Perl assures us that all the members of the consort have been familiar with Dowland’s music since childhood, and so have a special affinity with it. She also cites Sting’s Dowland disc “Songs from the Labyrinth” (DG, A/06) as being one of the inspirations behind the present recording while making it obvious she doesn’t agree with the pop singer’s approach.

Mields’s slight accent aside, the songs are a pleasure to listen to: the voice – full yet light and with just a hint of vibrato – blends fully with the sonorous, well balanced and highly musical Sirius Viols (witness “In darkness let me dwell”) while yielding to the gentle majesty of Santana’s expertly played lute (“Time stands still”); interpretatively, Mields’s overall phrasing and identifying the main semantic stress of each line reveals a good understanding of both text and music.

The instrumental pieces are equally satisfying, especially the Lachrimae pavans and the two lute solos with which Santana begins and ends the disc. In many ways, this is an ideal companion to Andreas Scholl’s excellent “Crystal Tears” (Harmonia Mundi, 9/08), and certainly worthy of standing alongside the classic Consort of Musicke recordings (L’Oiseau-Lyre, 2/89) so admired by these younger musicians.