achingly plangent … the poignancy of these songs from medieval and traditional sources – recorded on early and folk instruments immediately after the untimely passing of Savall’s artistic partner, soprano Monserrat Figueras – becomes an obvious metaphor: missing voices memorialised in lovely, evocative, profound and fugitive sound.

This is a beguiling, mesmeric sequence of instrumental music from Armenia, in which Hesperion XXI are joined by a group of that country’s finest musicians...[The duduk's] beautiful, musky sound seductively reflects the predominantly nostalgic, lamenting, soulful mood of the pieces heard here.

Haunting and tragic, this CD is a double-lament — for Jordi Savall’s late wife, the singer Montserrat Figueras, who loved Armenian music, and for Armenia, with its long history of foreign subjugation and massacre...It is hypnotic and exquisitely melancholic.