It's hard to say just what kind of market there is for a disc of Renaissance harp music, but there's no denying the agreeable, even soothing sound of these instruments--and there are several different types featured here--played with such conviction, clear articulation, and sensitivity by harpist Becky Baxter. Although among plucked stringed instruments we more often hear from the guitar, lute, and theorbo, in Renaissance Europe the harp held enough importance that, although comparatively small in quantity, music was published specifically for it, most notably in Spanish manuscripts. Given the nature of the instrument, primarily its role in accompanying songs and dances, much of the harp's solo music reflects its association with those traditional, popular forms, from engagingly melodic chansons to highly rhythmic dance styles. We get a fair selection of all of these kinds of pieces among the disc's 25 tracks, but on several tunes Baxter also is joined by instruments such as Baroque violin, an additional harp, guitar, and even bagpipes. For the pieces with bagpipe, the harp is fitted with "brays", which are special wooden pins set in the soundboard so the vibrating string will buzz against them. Together, the reedy sound of the bagpipes and the buzzing harp strings produce a wild and very colorful effect that's impossible to ignore. Baxter is one of the world's most accomplished and versatile masters of these difficult instruments, and she makes it all sound effortless. She also supplies informative liner notes and presents the whole program in excellent sound. --David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

In Scotland we are fortunate to enjoy a living oral tradition which features the performance of lengthy ballads to simple melodies in a manner which would certainly have been recognisable to our forebears in previous centuries, and it seems sensible to draw on this tradition when reconstructing a performance of 'Graysteil.' This cross-fertilisation between the traditional and art music of Scotland also serves helpfullly to undermine our modern habit of catagorising music, an irrelevance which would never even have occurred to James IV or his 'fithelaris'! - D. James Ross

The revival of the lute and its repertoire in the later twentieth century has been so thorough that it is difficult now to remember how much a "distant shore" the instrument seemed to musicians even a few generations ago. Like the cornett or the viola da gamba or the harpsichord, it was an instrument - and a repertoire, and a set of performance practices - that was all but dead for many years, that needed to be revived more or less from scratch. As for the lute music of the later Baroque period, it represents an instrument long past its heyday: even late-Baroque musicians themselves considered the lute a distant shore - an anachronism.