With a capaciously-filled boxset of a dozen CDs made up of attractive individual programmes and entitled The Spanish Guitar, Glossa reintroduces the superb playing of José Miguel Moreno. And with recordings from 1991-2004 which still sound fresh and vivid today. A new essay and all the sung texts are included in the physical booklet that completes this limited-edition set.

Just listening to soprano María Cristina Kiehr in her early collaborations with Gabriel Garrido is a sheer pleasure! Garrido is the big “discoverer” of music created in Latin America after the arrival of the “conquistadores” – this music bears strong traditional flavours, while at the same time reflecting the strong influences from Spain (especially) and Portugal. A big line-up of fine singers and instrumentalists supports the reconstruction of an essential repertory.

The Ferrara‐born Luzzasco Luzzaschi might not exactly be a household name, but his contribution to the development of the madrigal places him within that elite category of composers who helped shape the course of music history. The favourite musician of Duke Alfonso II, the last of the legitimate d’Este (the most intellectual and cultivated dynasty of Renaissance Italy) it was Luzzaschi who, in his role as the finest keyboard player of the period, cultivated the open score approach to performance. This was essentially a sort of motet of madrigal without words that focused on highly refined counterpoint and on the complexity of fugues i.e. four‐voice writing, without recourse to embellishment or any added prettiness. Only the second of the composer’s three books of ricercari, as detailed in this recording, has survived – a regrettable fact, given that the 1578 manuscript is unrivalled in its complexity among keyboard music of the second half of the 16th century.

Pierre de la Rue wurde möglicherweise um 1452 in Doornik/Tournai im heutigen Belgien geboren. Dort arbeitete sein Vater Jehan als Illuminator (Buchmaler), seine Mutter, Gertrude de la Haye, stammte ebenfalls aus Tournai. Im 15. Jahrhundert waren dort beide Familiennamen geläufig. Wir nehmen an, dass Pierres Ausbildung, besonders als Musiker, mit einer Verbindung als Chorsänger an der berühmten Kathedrale der Stadt anfing. Als solcher bekam er dann, wie dort alle Chorsänger, die Tonsur. Wenn so, dann war das die erste entscheidende Situation seines Lebenslaufs, den er letztlich als Diaconus beschließen sollte. Zum Priester wurde de la Rue anscheinend nie geweiht.

The most important known date in the life of Luys de Narváez is 1538, when he published this collection of vihuela music in Valladolid, the capital of Spain. He dedicated the publication to Francisco de los Cobos, in whose household he had been serving from at least 1526. By the time his patron died in 1547, he was in the royal chapel as master of the choir boys. He is known to have traveled to the Spanish Netherlands in 1549, but his date of death is no better known than his date of birth. His life certainly spanned the first half of the 16th century. The composer was a master on the instrument, and the publication followed by only two years the appearance of the first book of vihuela music.

To mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of Tallis, here are his biggest and best church compositions, performed in its customary high style by the Oxford Camerata under Jeremy Summerly (whose Fauré Requiem remains one of Naxos's all-time bestsellers). Tallis's youthful motet Salve intemerata is among the longest single-movement works of the 16th century, but it is Spem in alium, a work of Tallis's maturity, that overshadows any other English piece of the period, including those of his great contemporary, William Byrd. Scored for 40 independent voices, it is symphonic in proportion and resplendent in this surround-sound version.

This project from Göran Söllscher is a follow-up to his previous CD, the highly successful 'Eleven-String Baroque'. With the balanced sound of Söllscher's eleven-string guitar combined with the Baroque repertoire, the album spoke to not only his fans but also a wider audience craving relaxing music and congenial guitar sounds. In this same spirit, Söllscher's upcoming Renaissance album can be marketed to a wide audience including both his fans and new listeners in search of dreamy, soothing Renaissance melodies. The stylish cover artwork emphasizes both the freshness and universality of Söllscher's art. The album contains Renaissance lute masterpieces by various composers from Italy, Spain, Germany, France and England, the most popular of which were written by John Dowland. Söllscher delivers a dozen of tracks by Dowland, a composer who embodies the 'golden age' of English lute music.

Around the mid-16th century a collection of instrumental music titled Joyous Music (Musique de Joye) appeared in the French city of Lyons. Its contents featured music "appropriate for the human voice" and for "learning how to play spinets, violins, and flutes"–primarily in the form of dances such as pavanes, galliards, and branles. This recording–one of the finest of its kind in the catalog–gives us a generous sampling of the collection's great variety of pieces, which are played to near-perfection by an all-star lineup of early music specialists who perform on assorted viols, flutes, lute and guitar, spinet, and percussion. Three of the tracks are songs, expertly sung by soprano Montserrat Figueras–especially the charming "Il estoit une fillette" by Janequin.

Frank Wallace’s skill at performing self-accompanied songs is unusual and unsurpassed in the classical world. The Spanish repertoire he presents on this recording ranges from earthy to suave and sophisticated…one of the best vihuelists working today…Wallace also sings…no mean feat when one considers the polyphonic nature of the vihuela accompaniments…His renditions of fantasías by Narváez, other instrumental works, and song accompaniments are exemplary, bringing the kind of polish to the music that must have been prized in the Spanish noble houses.

Concierto de Música Europea del Siglo XV interpretado en el extraordinario Órgano de Papel de Leonardo da Vinci. Played by master organist and organ builder Joaquin Saura, accompanied by Grupo Música Antigua under the direction of Eduardo Paniagua. With all the information on the instrument, the program CD, an historical sketch of the times, the unpublished story of the alchemical experiment of Antorques de Plasencia, Josquin of Asura and canon Don Juan de Espina, and other curiosities and news. Made for the Exhibition "Leonardo y La Música" (PDF of the Event, included)

A sublime survey of sacred music of the high Renaissance, Hyperion's 2018 release Amarae Morti offers transparent performances by Peter Phillips and the a cappella chamber choir El León de Oro. Covering music of the Franco-Flemish and Iberian schools, the program follows a trajectory from darkness to light, from somber motets by Dominique Phinot, Orlande de Lassus, Nicolas Gombert, and Manuel Cardoso to glorious works by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cristóbal de Morales, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. There is a consistency of subjects in the program, which includes settings of the Lamentations, Media Vita, the Regina Coeli, and the Magnificat, revealing different treatments of these familiar texts and varying levels of complexity and contrapuntal mastery, which culminate in the magnificent polychoral works of Victoria and Palestrina.

In 1613 Robert ap Huw of Anglesey copied part of William Penllyn’s manuscript of harp tablature. This is the earliest surviving body of European harp music and contains Welsh bardic harp music from the 14th – 16th centuries. A combination of scholarship and imagination has enabled the reconstruction and interpretation of this unique music, played on historical harps.

Alexander Agricola was born in Ghent and was not only a contemporary of Josquin Desprez but also one of the most exciting composers of his period. Of the eight Masses by Agricola that have survived, the Missa in myne zyn is the most demanding to perform and the most elaborate, making use of every possible technique to include the thematic material of Agricola’s own 3-part song In myne zyn. The secular pieces recorded here lend themselves particularly well to the techniques of ornamentation and improvisation that the composer himself suggests. The Capilla Flamenca has long advocated the use of a group of soloists for the performance of polyphonic music; Agricola’s compositions suit the ensemble to perfection.

First recording. .. or the more colloquial "s__t happens" is as good a translation of the phrase "malheur me bat" as any. It's the title of a chanson of the late 15th Century. The rest of the text hasn't survived. We can assume that the chanson was a love lament, but not with any certainty; it might have been a general statement of the woes of mortality. Written in the Phrygian mode (E to e with no flats of sharps), it does have a melodically woeful cast. Polyphony in the Phrygian mode was not unusual, but it always involved the compositional difficulty of avoiding the "tritone" (the interval from F-natural to B-natural), so that raising the F or lowering the B (a practice we call ficta) often disguises the modal quality of the music.

Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger (b. Greenwich, c. 1575; bur. Greenwich, March 11, 1628) was an English composer and viol player of Italian descent. Although he gained access to the royal court as early as 1592, it took him almost 10 years to come to the attention of the queen, but in 1601 he became a member of the royal consort of viols. Ferrabosco marks the true beginning of the English Baroque. When Elizabeth I died in 1603, her successor James IV appointed Ferrabosco as music teacher to Henry, Prince of Wales and Ferrabosco continued to work in the king's service, becoming Composer of the King's Music in 1625, in 1626 succeeding John Coprario in the post of official court musician. The respect shown for him by his contemporaries proves that Ferrabosco was the court musician of his day, borne out by the fact that he was also the most copied.