Richard Egarr - One Byrde in Hande - The Sunday Times

Some might think Byrd’s keyboard music to be all stately Elizabethan pavanes and galliards. Not so, and while in this charismatic recital Egarr includes those and other smaller-scale pieces, he gives pride of place to the larger free-form fantasias, the grounds, the variations (on Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la and on Ut, mi, re) and, to close, the evocative masterpiece The Bells. It’s breathtakingly inventive music, and played accordingly.