****

"I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy," explained Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621. The music of John Dowland invited and indulged the then fashionable state of melancholy, and Andreas Scholl here explores that most rewarding area of repertoire. His plaintively light counter-tenor voice hauntingly negotiates the swells and swoons in the eloquent company of lute and viols. Scholl includes pieces by John Ward, Robert Johnson, William Byrd, John Bennet, Patrick Mando, Alfonso Ferrabosco II and Richard Mico, and the disc includes instrumental numbers as well as songs. Listen out for the whistling on track 11. The bonus DVD offers a 20-minute documentary on the recording sessions. www.harmonia mundi.com/uk/news.php

**

Violinist Eugene Drucker rehashes familiar old arguments in his sleeve note: "Bach's ideas in these fugues are so pure that they transcend the characteristics of the instrument for which he wrote them." And he points out that "separate instruments can make it easier for listeners to hear the various voices and the way the statements of the subject and countersubject are interwoven". The fugues are from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the arrangements by Mozart and one Emanuel Aloys Förster (1748-1823). The Emerson String Quartet's style of playing, while it may achieve the stated aims of clarity, takes the music out of the stylistic ambit of Bach and into a kind of no-man's land. The effect has to do with the way the quintet so successfully create a fully homogenised string quartet sound.

***

There can be something a little forbidding about Maurizio Pollini's Mozart. Perhaps he wants to be sure of avoiding what's often called the Dresden china effect in Mozart. Prettiness is minimal and gravitas is the order of the day in this second helping of concertos, in which he directs the Vienna Philharmonic from the keyboard. The firm grip of Pollini's own delivery and the urgency with which he fires up the playing of the Vienna Philharmonic seem fully in tune with the dark tensions of the Concerto in C minor. The approach in the earlier and lighter Concerto in A, K414, can seem too little prepared to unwind and relax.