John Dowland, William Lawes, Henry Purcell, John Holloway

John Dowland's Lachrimae pavans, published in 1604, are among the summits of English consort music. They are seven slow dances built on the falling melody of his song Flow My Teares, each turning the same material in a new harmonic light. The baroque violinist John Holloway does not play them as one sequence. He makes them the spine of a concert programme, alternating them with fantasies and airs by Henry Purcell, William Lawes, John Jenkins, Thomas Morley and Matthew Locke.

Holloway's earlier ECM albums set his violin against a keyboard or continuo. Here he joins an all-string consort as one voice among equals. With him are Monika Baer on violin and viola, Renate Steinmann and Susanna Hefti on viola, and Martin Zeller on bass violin. The scoring is four violas over a bass violin, and Dowland's lute part is left out, since Holloway argues that the five string parts are complete in themselves. The album was recorded in March 2013 at the Radio Studio in Zürich, engineered by Andreas Werner and produced by Manfred Eicher, as an ECM and SRF2 Kultur co-production. Holloway also wrote the liner notes.

The pavans keep their order, from Lachrimae Antiquae to Lachrimae Verae, with Lachrimae Tristes at the centre of the disc, the darkest of the set. Between them, Purcell's Fantasy upon one note weaves its counterpoint around the one held note of its title, and the last interlude, Lawes's five-part Fantasy in C for 5, has an autumnal colour. Morley's Lamento for 2 comes from his Canzonets for two voyces, and Locke's fantasy from The Broken Consort. Without the lute, the sound is brighter and more exposed than the viol consort usually heard in this repertoire.

Critics noted that clarity, and also its cost. Writing in BBC Music Magazine in 2014, Paul Riley found the playing "superbly fastidious and concentrated" and the result "brighter, more edgy than viol performances", with some austerity at the cadences. In Early Music Review, Peter Holman questioned whether four violas are historically right, yet concluded that "the playing on this CD is very fine". For Gary Higginson at MusicWeb International, it was a version that throws new light on the masterwork.

CD, ECM New Series 2189, first released in March 2014.