D'Amore is the first ECM album under the name of the violist Garth Knox, and it is devoted to the viola d'amore. By 1800 this baroque instrument, too soft for anything but small rooms, was already a curiosity. It has seven bowed strings and seven sympathetic strings that resonate with whatever is played. Knox takes it through music from the early 1600s to his own day, in a spirit of discovery rather than historical reconstruction.

Knox is a former member of the Arditti Quartet and a soloist long associated with the Ensemble InterContemporain. Born in Ireland and raised in Scotland, he also brings in Celtic tunes from his own background. The French cellist Agnès Vesterman plays the bass lines Knox wrote for his arrangements, because he felt the music needed a bass for harmony and balance. The album was recorded in September 2006 at the Propstei St. Gerold in Austria, with Stephan Schellmann as engineer. Manfred Eicher produced.

The disc opens with Knox's Malor me bat (2004), a fantasy on an old Flemish song that once inspired masses by Obrecht and Josquin. A solo cadenza comes first, then the tune is explored with the cello. Marin Marais's Les Folies d'Espagne and Tobias Hume's A Pavin, a viola da gamba piece, sound in Knox's arrangements like a single enlarged gamba. Attilio Ariosti's Prima Lezione represents the 18th-century repertoire written for the instrument itself. Roland Moser's two-part Manners of Speaking (2006) and Klaus Huber's ...Plainte..., a 1990 homage to Luigi Nono with its resonating strings tuned in microintervals, use retunings that bend the instrument's resonance. Two traditional pieces, Celtic Dance and I Once Loved a Lass with a jig, close the album before the Huber.

Gramophone made it Disc of the Month. Ivan Moody wrote there that it was "quite simply one of the most outstandingly magical discs I have heard", praising the rich sound of viola d'amore and cello together. In MusicWeb International, Glyn Pursglove called the Huber "a poignant tribute, its silences as eloquent as its fragments of melody". Reviewing for the Financial Times, David Honigmann noted the knuckles knocking on soundboards to mark the beat in the Celtic dances.

CD edition, ECM New Series 1925, released in March 2008. The booklet includes notes by Knox and by Paul Griffiths.