RENMEN LAMENTS

They always put together a fascinating programme, the Renaissance Men, and with a name like that, eclecticism can usually be assumed. This brings together material by Daniel Gawthrop, Thomas Tallis, Darius Milhaud, Patricia van Ness and Pablo Casals, who can’t have appeared together on a concert programme or CD before. The singing is strong, accurate, committed and bright (in all the right senses for an album of laments). The Gawthrop piece, The Settings of Isaiah the Prophet, is a bit of a revelation, and wisely reserved for last, coming in right after Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, which might well be its inspiration.

BRIAN MORTON Read the full review on Agora Classica