Gradually we come to understand why they do what they do, what their real worth is.
Lighting up their dark worlds are an angelic English lute player and a beautiful maid-in-waiting. The setting is 17th-century Denmark, with interludes in Ireland, England and Norway, and at first the characters seem impossibly baroque – a king who insists on his musicians playing in a damp cellar so his guests can hear eerily unseen music, a consort with frenzied sexual appetites, an Irish earl obsessed with a melody heard in a dream, a child so abused by his stepmother that he retreats into the world of insects. Never has the domestic brightwork been so highly polished or the dog so energetically walked.
Jenny Agutter's reading of Rose Tremain's magnificent novel Music and Silence is a long haul to listen to, but I found myself dreaming up excuses to don headphones.
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