The Brook Street Band join forces with the Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford, and their director Owen Rees, for the first ever pairing on disc of the two settings of the Dixit Dominus by Alessandro Scarlatti and George Frideric Handel.

The organ has been regarded as an orchestra from its earliest beginnings, and over the years many composers have transposed vocal and orchestral works for the instrument.

Most of Monteverdi's motets for one voice were among his late publications, like the celebrated Selva morale e spirituale (Venice, 1640). An aboluste master of what he called the seconda prattica, he demonstrated in these pieces all of the skill he had acquired over the years in writing for the solo voice. Just as he had taken the madrigal to its peak of perfection, Monteverdi here realises the achievements of the Baroque period in this form of religious music inherited from the early centuries of polyphonic writing. The performers have striven to revive the typically Venetian context of the time, placing these sublime works in a framework of instrumental toccatas and sinfonias by his contemporaries Marini, Merulo and Antegnati.

A pupil of his uncle Don Angelo Durante, head of the S Onofrio Conservatory in Naples, Francesco Durante established himself as a leading composer of church music, after a period of further study in Rome. He served as primo maestro at the Neapolitan Conservatori Poveri di Gesù Cristo, where his pupils included Pergolesi, later moving to the same position at the S Maria di Loreto Conservatory and finally at S Onofrio. His later pupils included Piccinni.
Durante’s fame as a composer rested on his achievements in the field of church music. His works include Masses, motets, antiphons, canticles, psalms and litanies.

François Campion est généralement considéré comme le plus important guitariste baroque français après Robert de Visée. Il succède à Maltot comme guitariste et théorbiste dans l'orchestre de l'Académie royale de Musique de 1703 ou 1704 à 1719. Maltot lui transmet la règle de l'octave qu'il consignera plus tard dans son Traité d'Accompagnement (1716). Il reçoit alors le titre Maître de guitare et de théorbe à l'Académie royale de Musique de la part du roi Louis XIV (on pense qu'il a bénéficié la protection du duc de Noailles). Il utilise des tablatures, très courantes à cette époque, pour l'écriture de ses pièces pour guitare. Il emploie 8 accords. On considère ses compositions comme claires et riches en modulations et développant le jeu de l'instrument.

For this new recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Jordi Savall conducts an all-female orchestra, as Vivaldi did in his time at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. The soloist Alfia Bakieva is a violinist of Tatar origin currently living in Salzburg, Austria. She is a multi-instrumentalist, parti- cularly in the field of folk music, playing violin, folk fiddle, kyl- kobiz, ghizzhak and similar instruments. She studied Baroque violin with Enrico Onofri (Palermo Conservatory) and Hiro Kurosaki (Mozarteum University), focusing on historically in- formed performance practices in the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoires. Such a profile made her the ideal candidate for a collaboration with Jordi Savall. She plays a Francesco Ruggeri violin, built in 1680 in Cremona, Italy. This double album sold at the price of a single new release of- fers the recording of the Four Seasons with and without the son- nets written by Vivaldi and four others concerti by Vivaldi. The version with read text sheds a particularly revealing light on Vivaldi’s work.

In her debut album, Melody Lin offers splendid musical fireworks, taking on some of the most technically challenging and arresting harpsichord repertoire available.

This new recording by Matteo Cicchitti and his ensemble Musica Elegentia is devoted to Michele Mascitti, a Baroque composer who, already in his time, was particularly esteemed and rightly considered a major testimonial of Italian instrumental music in France in the 18th century. In particular, this world premiere recording of his Triosonatas op. 1, published in Paris in 1704, spotlights the composer's attempt to recall the tradition of the Corellian sonata, while complying with the French 'gout' of the dedicatee, the Duke d'Orléans.

Violinst Rachel Podger presents the first recording of Bach's Cello Suites on violin. Bach had a habit of recycling his own compositions for different instruments and different uses. The examples are endless; concertos appearing as sinfonias in cantatas, or concertos for violins turned into harpsichord concertos. Podger, who has spent a fair bit of time coaching cellists, both modern and baroque alike, found herself playing along to demonstrate various points. ''I started catching myself playing some of the movements I particularly loved while warming up, and realizing that it was actually possible to play them on the violin, and to find a special expressive vocabulary at the higher pitch.''

After 400 years, the Fieri Consort reveal newly-discovered madrigals of Maddalena Casulana alongside works by another of Italy’s greatest composers, Barbara Strozzi.

The pianist Thomas Jarry here borrows the famous Cello Suites of Johann Sebastian Bach in an innovative reading at the piano. Harmony and counterpoint, reconstructed on a solid historical and musicological foundation, offer the listener the possibility of experiencing these legendary works in a new three-dimensional version. Dare to re-discover the complete Cello Suites, recorded on an exceptional Gaveau concert piano dating from 1953.

Through this exciting recording, the violinist Fabio Biondi pursues his exploration of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoire for solo violin. Two years after his complete recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's solo Sonatas and Partitas (V 5467), he lands on entirely unknown territory, the Assaggi by the Swedish composer Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758). Rarely lasting more than twelve minutes, the Assaggi is thus a fascinating melting-pot of multiple aesthetics in vogue in Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Fabio Biondi champions this little known territory of the European late baroque with a voracious generosity and highly eloquent sense of phrase.

Martin Helmchen belongs to the category of great piano virtuosos who are also interested in early instruments: ‘One of the most thrilling moments of my life as a pianist was when I encountered the intact, original Spät & Schmahl tangent piano from 1790. My initial doubts about a pianist of today being able to master such an instrument rapidly gave way to the swelling conviction that here one could make certain things in Bach’s music sound in a way that is impossible on both the harpsichord and the modern piano.

Finnish cellist Max Lilja, one of the founders of Apocalyptica, takes us on an immersive journey across Johann Sebastian Bach’s life; through merging the iconic Cello Suites with an ambient composition, Lilja enlightens the space around the solitary voice.

‘The happy years’: an expression that is particularly apt for J. S. Bach’s period in Cöthen. Freed from the obligations that held him back in Weimar and not yet caught up in the Leipzig treadmill, Prince Leopold’s protégé produced masterpieces of such flamboyance that Benjamin Alard could not resist the pleasure of inviting some of his dear musician friends to join him around the splendid three-manual harpsichord by Hass.