Lee Santana's 2002 album The Star and the Sea features his original compositions for lute and viola da gamba on poetic themes. Though their timbres are evocative of Renaissance and Baroque music, these pieces' modern harmonies, updated modality, and quasi-improvisational style place them more in the adult contemporary or new age categories. Santana and his partner, Hille Perl, play with credible skill and apparent ease on their instruments -- three lutes and two violas da gamba -- though the looseness of Santana's musical structures and his overly blurred sonorities leave an impression of mystical vagueness and create shifting atmospheres rather than concrete ideas. The pieces are arranged in suites, Greenpeace Music II-V (1989-2000), and the Bilder Ballet I (1992), and interspersed with two recitations of Caliban's soliloquies from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The presentation has a bit of the faux archaism one might associate with the Society for Creative Anachronism, and Santana and Perl seem overly earnest in their utopian liner notes; but in terms of the music's own merits, this CD is pleasant and suitable for daydreaming or for quiet pastimes, but not much more substantial than that. Carpe Diem's recording is direct and unprocessed, and captures the performances' natural resonance without filtering.