This is an admirable marriage between scholarly revelation and uninhibited delight in performance...Kirkby has thrilled us for years with her sparkling Italianate virtuosity. She's no less outstanding in the subtleties of French singing, decorating lines with nuanced trills, turns and leaning dissonances, while sustaining an irresistable sense of purpose and forward direction.

Kirkby embellishes every note with a grace, lightness and sparkle which other sopranos in careers half as long have already lost. Her taste serves expression. Baroque swirls, shakes, roulades and turns float as weightlessly as cherubs on a church ceiling...She engages with the instruments. Voice and violin mimic each other in the death of Dido while in Triomfe de la Constance, the sombre gamba is her echo.

Emma Kirkby singing French repertoire is a rare thing but her old friends London Baroque are steeped in it, and these performances are as stylish as one could wish...Kirkby's voice could have been brought further forward but her ever-present virtues of clarity, secure passagework and interpretative intelligence still emerge

Though in her sixties, Dame Emma Kirkby summons all her old vocal glories — clean line, plangent timbre, deft ornaments, impeccable intonation and a superb response to text...it’s in the laments for Dido and Lucretia that she is at her most expressive, and here, too, that London Baroque’s astringent single strings are most effective.