It's a great time for lovers of Italian vocal music, with Carlotta Colombo taking an intimate look at the musical background from which opera was able to emerge, taking advantage both of changing compositional techniques and gifted singers, and Les Kapsber'girls serving up a third helping of Baroque compositions by women from the Italian peninsula. We've also got a bit of an Iberian double-bill - the RIAS Kammerchor build a gorgeous programme of Spanish polyphony (Victoria and a little Guerrero) around the ancient Ave maris stella hymn, while Arte Minima indulge in the rich textures of Vicente Lusitano at the height of his immense compositional powers.
Elsewhere, Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset revel in Salieri's opera using fabled 'Tartary' as a setting for a no-holds-barred satire of European politics; Beatrice Rana and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta perform Bach concertos on the piano in accounts blending the best of old and new; The London Handel Players take us on a miniaturised tour of Europe through Telemann's first set of 'Paris Quartets'; and the Orlando Consort round off their complete Machaut survey.
Seventeen CDs of joy await lovers of Buxtehude - a broad and deep sampling of the Danish composer's work ranging from compositions for the organ and harpsichord to chamber and choral works, and featuring Simone Stella, Pieter-Jan Belder, Ensemble Fantasticus, Luthers Bach Ensemble and more.
New books recently published include an in-depth yet approachable analysis of Bach's monumental Well-Tempered Clavier, and an exploration of the lives and careers of medieval minstrels. Lining up nicely with some of this round-up's recording choices, there's also a study of the links between music and romance in the love-letters of Early Modern Italy, and an impressive overview of the often tortuous familial relationships portrayed in Old Testament-inspired oratorios.
We've been talking to Ensemble Nevermind about their new arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, to veteran conductor Harry Christophers about the links connecting Bingen and Taverner to Pärt and the present day, to Jeannette Sorrell about three influential female musicians who helped shape a unique historical moment in late sixteenth-century Ferrara, and to James Ehnes about recording Bach's complete violin concertos.
And as if all that weren't enough, our Early Music sale is still in full swing - with up to 45% off selected CDs, SACDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays and Vinyls until 4th June - so don't miss out on a bargain!
Early Music Round-Up – February 2025
Curated by David Smith
Tracks from the recordings featured in the latest of our Early Music Round-Ups. 2 hours 12 minutes
Recordings
The 'Gloucester Handel' - or at any rate a provincial answer to the predominantly London-based 'Caro Sassone'. The Corelli Orchestra under Warwick Cole shines a light on William Hayes's delightful orchestral music, spanning a career as composer, organist, singer, conductor and writer that took him from Gloucester Cathedral to Magdalen College, Oxford - where he also spearheaded the construction of the now-famous Holywell Music Room. Alongside concerti grossi, trio sonatas and keyboard concerti (featuring Cole as soloist), a particular gem here is the extended, pictorial sinfonia 'The Fall of Jericho', featuring some remarkable writing for the solo oboe.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV
Built around Victoria's Missa Ave Maris Stella, which weaves itself around the ancient hymn praising the Virgin Mary as a star to the 'wandering barks' of the faithful for them to navigate the seas of life, this gorgeous new album from the German chamber choir is punctuated by three motets by Guerrero and concludes with Victoria's eight-part Ave Maria. An absolute feast of Spanish polyphony at its finest.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV
A little outside the normal boundaries of early music, but it's such fun I couldn't resist. The nominally East Asian setting is the thinnest of figleaves for a merciless satire on European royal court intrigues. Think 'what if Gilbert and Sullivan had written Turandot in 1788' and you'll be off to a pretty good start. A drunkard Khan, backstabbing viziers, bumbling aristocrats and interfering Westerners all collide in a plot that asks pointed questions about the nature of political power in the era of Enlightenment.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV
A 'new-old' album - Rana heads off the perhaps inevitable objections to her use of the modern piano for these Bach keyboard concertos by observing that they are themselves almost all reworkings of solo-instrumental originals. The early music revival has come round in enough of a circle that musicians such as Rana can apply authentic principles even from the keyboard of an instrument 250 years removed from the composer, and the result is a performance that feels Baroque in a way many other modern-instrument accounts fail to.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res+ FLAC/ALAC/WAV
The triumphant conclusion of the Orlando Consort's complete Machaut survey, featuring complex polytextural motets where the counterpoint is between three sets of words as much as between three vocal lines. Juxtapositions between the extinguishing of candles in the sombre Tenebrae liturgy and the burning fire of the lover's devotion to his lady might seem almost sacrilegious to modern minds, but for Machaut the cross-pollination between the texts is part of the intellectual joy of the motet.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res+ FLAC/ALAC/WAV
Arte Minima present a selection of motets by the Portuguese composer Vicente Lusitano, showing both his inheritance from Gombert and Josquin and his integration of other Iberian composers' ideas. The first and last motets on the album represent Lusitano boldly 'one-upping' Josquin as a demonstration of his skill as a contrapuntalist, reimagining Josquin's own settings of the Inviolata and Praeter rerum texts with the addition of more vocal parts. Following likely practice at the time, some of Lusitano's complex inner parts here are performed on recorders.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV
An ensemble with perhaps an even more groan-inducing pun of a name than the 2000s' popular male voice choir 'Only Men Aloud', Les Kapsber'girls continue their series of albums of music by Baroque women composers with this collection of compositions by Strozzi, Leonarda, Quinciani, Caccini, Bembo and Campana. Some of these women struck out independently within the mainstream of their male-dominated society; others, such as Leonarda, entered convents but (as her two hundred compositions indicate) didn't let that hold them back from compositional success.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV
Focusing on the virtuose of seventeenth-century Italy, this album from Carlotta Colombo and Anima & Corpo provides us with a glimpse into the music and careers of some of the great singers who helped to shape the beginnings of opera. Taking as its starting-point Monteverdi's famous and influential Lamento d'Arianna, it draws together works by well-known names such as Rossi and Frescobaldi, as well as contemporaries of theirs on the Roman scene who have fallen off the radar of history - Rainaldi, Quagliati and Catalani.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV
A smörgåsbord of European styles by the cosmopolitan Telemann, these quartets include Italian-style concertos, German-style sonatas and French-style dance-suites, as well as distinct echoes of his time spent in Poland. The London Handel Players are unequalled in chamber repertoire of this kind - flautist Rachel Brown and violinist Adrian Butterfield bouncing off each other with energy and sparkle. By his own admission, Telemann was less interested in virtuosic writing in his concertos, and more in dialogue between the parts. That 'conversational' mindset could hardly be clearer than in these performances.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV
Maurice Greene: Jephtha
Andrew Staples (tenor), Mary Bevan (soprano), Michael Mofidian (bass-baritone), Jeremy Budd (tenor), Jessica Cale (soprano), Early Opera Company, Christian Curnyn
Stepping into the vacuum left by Handel's temporary departure from the oratorio arena, and very much geared towards catering to the unsated demand for further dramatic works in the same mould, Maurice Greene's Jephtha is a rather more psychological work than Handel's later treatment of the same story. Relatively little happens outside the minds of the characters, but the drama is none the less. Notably, Greene's work eschews the last-minute Deus ex machina with which Handel's libretto saves Jephtha's daughter from her fate.
Available Formats: 2 SACDs, MP3, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV
New Box-set
Buxtehude Collection
Simone Stella, Luthers Bach Ensemble, Ensemble Fantasticus, Emma Kirkby, Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir, Aradia Ensemble
The legacy of Buxtehude is indisputable - inspiring the young Bach with his Lübeck Abendmusiken concerts and composing works in every imaginable genre, helping to drive the evolution of the Baroque from late Renaissance German and North European styles. While not a complete opera omnia, this 17-CD collection showcases the breadth and depth of Buxtehude's talent. His complete output for the organ and harpsichord is included, as are significant proportions of his chamber works and cantatas.
Available Format: 17 CDs
Books
Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier forms part of the series American Bach Society Guides for the introduction of Johann Sebastian Bach's most important works and collections to a wider audience. Although the topic of this book is some of the most compostionally sophisticated music ever written, it avoids musical notation, explains necessary technical terminology, and assumes only basic knowledge of music history. This book presents the context, history, and music of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier based on the latest musicological research. It appeals to those who desire an introduction to the collectionor a refresher on its salient characteristics. The main topics include: definitions, descriptions, and history of Prelude, Fugue, Temperament, and Tonal Harmony; Bach's motivation for writing the collection and his compositional process; the work's reception history; and the philosophies and issues of performance practice.
Available Format: Book
A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these seemingly peripheral figures were keenly involved with all aspects of late medieval communities. Minstrels were a common sight and sound in the late Middle Ages. Aristocrats, knights and ladies heard them on great occasions (such as Edward I's wedding feast for his daughter Elizabeth in 1296) and in quieter moments in their chambers; town-dwellers heard and saw them in civic processions (when their sound drew attention to the spectacle); and even in the countryside people heard them at weddings, church-ales and other parish celebrations. But who were the minstrels, and what did they do? How did they live, and how easily did they make a living? How did they perform, and in what conditions? In this book Rastall and Taylor bring to bear the available evidence to enlarge and enrich our view of the minstrel in late medieval society.
Available Format: Book
In early modern Italy, letters were not only written and read but, in some cases, sung. Musical settings of love letters rekindled a complex kind of vocality which was rooted in the letters of antiquity and endured in the musical sub-genre of the lettera amorosa. Epistolary poetry served to transform, or, to echo Achillini's lettera set by Monteverdi (1567–1643), to 'distill' a lover's thoughts and emotions into verse, and the music that set it was equally transformative. The history of musical letters spans several centuries. It begins in the early sixteenth with a setting of Ovid's Heroides by Tromboncino; returns in the early seventeenth through the lettere amorose of Monteverdi, D'India, and Frescobaldi; and ends with epistolary cantatas by Carissimi, Melani, and Domenico Scarlatti. This Element traces the breadth and significance of the musical love letter with a focus on the provocative lettere amorose of the seventeenth century.
Available Format: Book
Biblical Families in Music reveals how difficult stories of fratricide, child sacrifice, death, and forbidden love performed a didactic function in oratorios, teaching early modern audiences about piety and the rules of proper family life. In the century after 1670, the heavily adapted tales of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, and the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael were set to music by figures such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Sacchini and performed during Lent in churches and other sacred spaces for an audience of court nobility, clergy, and the urban patriciate. By examining the resonance of Catholic oratorios within predominantly upper-class social realities, the book broadens our cultural understanding of the early modern European family and underscores the centrality of family and familial relation to social position, devotional taste, and identity.
Available Format: Book
