Quebec contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux scored a top rating on her earlier Analekta disc of Handel Italian cantatas, and in that review I expressed a desire for more recordings from this sensational young singer. If you enjoyed the Handel program (and if you don't have it, get it), you'll be just as happy with this new disc that combines two famous Baroque solo-vocal works with some engaging, relentlessly upbeat orchestral selections from the same period. Lemieux continues to impress with her warm, true-contralto tone, fluid legatos, canny phrasing, and total command of the technical aspects of these justifiably popular yet challenging works.

Avison’s ability to pattern his works on the music of others stood him in good stead throughout his career…His concertos are skillfully fashioned, have plenty of vitality and show perceptive use of dynamic contrast…Played as vibrantly and freshly as it is here, on period instruments by this expert ensemble from Avison’s own city, and led by the excellent violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk, one cannot help but respond to the vitality of the writing…–Penguin Guide

The imaginative musician that is harpsichordist Ignacio Prego directs a new selection of the concerti grossi by Charles Avison drawing inspiration from keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti. The Madrid-born Prego is alive to the variety of musical ideas embedded in these concertos – four of the concertos “after Scarlatti” that Avison had published in 1744: each concerto, with the ensemble divided into concertino and ripieno groups, is a sequence of movements, the appealing, lively, melodious and playful contrasting with the slow, light, restful and contemplative.

In the 1730s, many composers tried their luck in London. Geminiani revolutionized instrumental writing with his famous treatise on interpretation and presented an amazing version of La Folia; his pupil Avison orchestrated concertos by Scarlatti, and Porpora ventured away from opera to rediscover the vocality of the cello with one of the most beautiful concertos of that period. Ophélie Gaillard and Pulcinella treat us to a frenzied and poetic night in London. They meet Vivaldi, Hasse, Scottish composer James Oswald and virtuoso cellist Giovanni Battista Cirri. Guest artists Sandrine Piau and Lucile Richardot take on magnificent vocal pieces by Geminiani and Handel.

Newcastle-born and -based, Charles Avison issued his string arrangements of harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti in 1744. Forty-two of Scarlatti's sonatas had been published by Roseingrave in London five years earlier and it was these which, by and large, provided Avison with his material. 'By and large', since, as Stephen Roe remarks in his note, the sonatas included only two slow movements and Avison, planning 12 concertos in the slow-fast-slow-fast scheme favoured by his teacher, Geminiani, required 24.