Orlando Gough’s Birds on Fire is a three-movement suite inspired by Aaron Appelfeld’s novel Badenheim 1939. Middle-class Jews gather in a well-to-do Austrian resort that, during their stay, becomes a ghetto. Gough’s music, spread over Fretwork’s fine recital, uses kletzmer tunes. It’s both catchy and poignant, the medium of viols lending it an appropriate astringency. Much of the rest of the disc is devoted to Elizabethan and Jacobean viol consort music by members of two émigré dynasties of court musicians, the Lupos and the Bassanos, whose Jewishness was surmised only in 1983. These are as much in the English courtly vein as the anonymous works from the Lumley Part Books and a rich Fantasia by the Dutch-born Philip van Wilder, also recorded here.

Harmonia Mundi HMU907478

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