Named Gramophone’s One to Watch and winner of the 2022 International Handel Singing Competition, Alexander Chance makes his recording debut on Linn. Drop not, mine eyes is a recital of English lute songs that soaks up the zeitgeist of the past couple of years to create a programme full of melancholic works by Dowland, Campion, Danyel, Purcell and others. If the ever-popular Dowland was readily prone to sadness, as exemplified by the pair I saw my lady weep and Flow , my tears, or indeed In darkness let me dwell, the polymath Thomas Campion favoured a more sober style, as shown in I care not for these ladies . Thomas Ford displays his more profane side here with Fair, sweet, cruel and What then is love . When it comes to melancholy, John Danyel’s Grief, keep within and Drop not, mine eyes are every bit as good as Dowland. The programme closes with Purcell, the other English Orpheus. Toby Carr provides sympathetic accompaniment on lute and theorbo.

This powerful yet understated recital of modern and seventeenth-century works aims to revisit but also to re-balance the obsession of earlier music with female abandonment and lament. The stories of women such as Dido and Ariadne have been told and retold throughout history. Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston reconsiders the assumed helplessness of those often seen as being left behind by male adventure and success. A recent work commissioned for Charlston from the composer Owain Park further takes up the challenge of giving ‘abandoned women’ their own platform, as well as exploring new possibilities for an instrumental pairing – that of voice and theorbo – that remains little explored in contemporary music.