It was amateur choirs not the conservatory that launched the career of this pioneering English soprano and early music specialist.

Jakob Lindberg has well and truly earned his reputation as one of the top lute players in the world. In this fine recital, he performs the music of Francesco da Milano, Marco dall’Aquila and Alberto da Mantova. In its heyday, the lute was the instrument of the greatest composers in the same way the piano was the instrument of choice in later centuries. These three Italian Renaissance lutenists were regarded as some of the finest musicians of the age (for example, da Milano was apparently nicknamed “Il Divino” and described as being “superior to Orpheus and Apollo”!). Although this is music of dense, criss-crossing contrapuntal lines, which makes it sound knotty and complex, in fact these pieces are ever-tuneful. In the liner notes, Lindberg divides the pieces into three categories – fantasias/ricecars (where the composer writes freely whatever he feels like), intabulations (re-workings of music originally for voices), and dances. Adept combining of pieces from each category ensures that there’s never a dull moment and that the pieces are shown in their best light, with ricecars rubbing shoulders with vocal music by Josquin and Arcadelt. BIS certainly knows how to make the instrument sound good. There’s a subtle reverb to…

This superb recital could as easily have been entitled “Jakobean” Lute Music, so complete is London-based Swedish lutenist Jakob Lindberg’s mastery of this music. Equally at home in the Spanish, Italian and Germanic lute repertoire – his Weiss is particularly fine – he has for some decades been one of the foremost interpreters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute repertoire. Only Paul O’Dette comes close to matching Lindberg’s combination of stylistic flair and technical ability. One need only compare their respective interpretations of the music of Daniel Bacheler: both players capture to perfection the insouciance of the virtuosic sets of variations and the profundity of the slower pavans and preludes. By the time James I became king in 1603 the lute was well established as the courtly instrument par excellence, and composer/performers of quality and imagination were legion. Apart from Bacheler there was Thomas Robinson, Cuthbert Hely, Robert Johnson, Jacques Gaultier, and the great John Dowland. Together with that most prolific of composers, anon, all the above are represented by typical dance movements such as the pavan, galliard, gigue, courante and sarabande, as well as improvisatory preludes and sets of variations on popular tunes. Performing on his restored Sixtus Rawolf…