Finale – An Evening with Pentangle is actually a ‘composite evening’ compiled from eight dates (and venues) from the folk-jazz group's penultimate tour. As the list of personnel may remind, this is Pentangle's original and core line-up.

The double CD draws on recordings made by Paul Smith and the sound clarity is excellent. Symbolically, Pentangle had begun the tour on 29 June 2008 with a ‘homecoming’ to London's Royal Festival Hall (nothing from which appears on Finale) where they had made their concert debut in 1967. To the very day, they had appeared there in 1968 for a gig that contributed the live half to their half-studio, half-concert Sweet Child. Initial work on Finale got underway with Bert Jansch mixing and sequencing.

(He died in October 2011.) John Renbourn (who died in March 2015) worked on preparing the album masters. Rafe McKenna is credited with Finale's final mix and Peter Beckmann its final mastering.

‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’, a traditional song rich in metaphor, opens Disc 1 with vocalist Jacqui McShee in stunning form. Disc 2 opens with the folk revival enigma Anne Briggs’ song ‘The Time Has Come’. Even without the nudge from its title, Jansch's take on ‘The Snows’ (more fully, the traditional ‘The Snow It Melts the Soonest’) is the stuff of shivers. If that selective taste of repertoire suggests a folk or folk-rock bias, you are right, dear reader. Semi-balancing that is their instrumental take on Mingus’ ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ – testimony to the open ears of the British folk scene in the 1960s.

The no-note-unnecessary ‘Light Flight’ is to marvel at. Swoon with Terry Cox's percussive finesse and Danny Thompson's earth-bass underpinnings. ‘Wedding Dress’ with Jansch's hoedown banjo reinforces how Pentangle knew how to shade and shape a set.

There would be final appearances at Glastonbury, the Cambridge Folk Festival and the Royal Festival Hall in 2011, but this bookending release serves not only as a fitting epitaph but also reminds why Pentangle will always occupy a uniquely-theirs place not merely in the annals of folk-jazz crossover but also in post-war British music making.