After the extraordinary success of Battle Cry, his duo album with mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston – recipient of both Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine awards in 2023 – Toby Carr returns to Delphian with his debut solo recording, on which centuries of music meet in the intimate sound-world of the Renaissance lute.

Interweaving seventeenth-century English and French repertoire by Dowland, Robert Johnson, Robert Ballard and others with Carr’s own arrangements of Purcell, Eccles, Satie and Poulenc, the programme traces unexpected continuities of gesture, harmony and expression across four hundred years. At its centre is Blue, specially commissioned from guitarist and composer Laura Snowden, whose heightened, personal language responds to the rhetorical elegance of early lute music while exploring the instrument’s modern possibilities.