There is much that the listener will find familiar in Radiant Dawn, the new release—and Hyperion’s Record of the Month for August—from Owain Park and The Gesualdo Six. The ensemble’s ‘matchless singing’ (BBC Music Magazine), for example, and the ‘beautifully sung and meticulously researched’ programme (Gramophone); both may be taken for granted. Yet here there is a difference: threaded throughout the album is the solo trumpet of Matilda Lloyd. Whether in the Renaissance motets to which she contributes ecstatic instrumental descants, or in recently commissioned works, her playing brings a thrilling extra dimension to the G6’s exploration of darkness and light.

The most famous depiction of a swan in music may be that by Saint-Saëns in his Carnival of the animals, but it’s by no means unique. Cellist Mats Lidström and his pianist son Leif Kaner-Lidström have taken it as the starting point of Swans, a homage to Saint-Saëns and a fascinating collection of swannish meditations. We encounter swans from the seventeenth century (by Orlando Gibbons) and the twenty-first (both Mats and Leif contribute their own original compositions); there are Polish swans by Szymanowski, Brazilian ones by Villa-Lobos and many others—no fewer than twenty-four in all, which take graceful flight in Mats’s sympathetic arrangements.