Browse: Presto Recordings of the Year, Renaissance (era)

This is a glorious addition to the Monteverdi 450 celebrations. — BBC Music Magazine, September 2017, More…

Some may find the extensive spoken liturgy excessive but such is Simon Russell Beale’s compelling delivery that the sheer beauty of the words offers a musical diversion of a different kind. Most... — Gramophone Magazine, June 2019 More…

Though the top of her voice is wiry under pressure, her coloratura is tightly sprung, her diction is flawless, and her phrasing of the often underrated poetry is sympathetic and sophisticated…Il... — BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2016, More…

Shibe performs with superb artistry some of the now classics that Bream inspired...Prime in any such catalogue is Britten's 1963 Nocturnal after John Dowland, and Shibe gathers the listener into... — BBC Music Magazine, October 2017, More…

there's the sense of music in possession of a free spirit and keen to test boundaries both expressive and virtuosic...Predictably there's an unfailing eloquence to everything Podger does, whether... — BBC Music Magazine, December 2014, More…

The Western Wynde Mass nicely contrasts with The Tallis Scholars’ recording, being incisive and brisk where Peter Phillips’s reading is smoother and more leisurely. Parrott is perhaps more persuasive... — Gramophone Magazine, May 2016 More…

The sound of Jakob Lindberg's lute, made by Sixtus Rauwolf in the last decade of the 16th century, is unusually warm...It a meticulously voiced recital that moves between court, theatre and tavern...Lindberg... — BBC Music Magazine, April 2014, More…

Five songs from Finzi’s incomparable Let us Garlands Bring see the tenor’s head voice floating sympathetically through the melismatic vowels and ever-shifting metres of Finzi’s most sensitive... — BBC Music Magazine, November 2016 More…

Ed Lyon sings all three languages with great clarity and alertness to the sense of the words, ornaments his line idiomatically and displays an appealing ease and evenness of voice production... — BBC Music Magazine, December 2019, More…

Skinner's scholarly expertise both strengthens and weakens his conducting. Cadences, modal shifts and points of imitation steer his reading. Especially when the English Cornett & Sackbutt Ensemble... — BBC Music Magazine, January 2015, More…