Here one finds an historically informed and wholly satisfying approach that has spring in its step in the exuberant allegros and beguiling grace and tenderness in the slow movements. Again, Naxos has mounted a formidable challenge to the full-price competition with a well-recorded release that is a steal at the price.

Cecilia Bartoli's new CD features a collection of music that could not be heard in her native Rome at the start of the 18th century due to Papal censorship. Theaters, the Church felt, were places of evil and corruption and operas led people to immorality. But some music-loving senior members of the priesthood asked composers to write oratorios and cantatas–indeed, operas without staging, essentially–for their own private entertainment. Call it what you will, the music is sensational–by turns virtuosic, gentle, and playful–and always expressive: just right, it seems, for Cecilia Bartoli's temperament. The opening aria on the CD, a call for peace in the name of Jesus, is, in fact, a dazzling martial air with trumpets blaring and the voice going through an amazing array of coloratura fireworks.

A genius with the ability to combine French and Italian influences in an art that transported the English language, Purcell may be William Christie's favourite composer.This production of Dido and Aeneas, directed by Deborah Warner and interpreted by Les Arts Florissants, was overwhelmingly acclaimed when created at the Vienna Festival in 2006 and again when repeated at the Opéra Comique in 2008.This short opera, one of the earliest, is particularly dear to William Christie who has recorded and directed it on several occasions.

King Arthur (1691), like Purcell’s other great scores for the stage, belongs to a highly unusual genre: it is neither a play nor an opera but a hybrid of the two known as ‘semi-opera’. Alfred Deller’s legendary 1978 recording is one of the benchmark interpretations which introduced music-lovers to Purcell’s masterpiece.

The term “Hanseatic” in this program titled Festive Hanseatic Music originates from the word Hansa, which simply means a company of merchants trading overseas. The selections here were mostly composed during the waning years of the so-called Hanseatic league–an alliance of primarily prosperous northern European cities that began in the 13th century and ended in the 17th. While commerce for the Hanseatic league may have been on the decline during this period, the quality of the works offered on this new CPO CD clearly gives the impression that its musical life was thriving.

The thirty-two polyphonic madrigals by Michelangelo Rossi, which are preserved only in manuscript in a score and a set of partbooks, have only recently become known. These pieces are unusual in a number of ways: on the one hand, for music from the second quarter of the seventeenth century, they seem "conservative", composed in five parts with two tenor voices instead of two sopranos.

Although his name might not rate very highly on the recognition meter even of classical music buffs, Franz Tunder was a consequential entity in the early history of the German Baroque. Tunder served as organist at the Marienkirche in Lübeck from 1641 to his death in 1667, and during that time instituted the Abendmusiken, the first series of public concerts to take place in Germany. Seventeen vocal "concertos" exist from Tunder's pen and they were created for these special events; little more than half of them appear on this generous and well-performed CPO disc, Franz Tunder: Concerti. Conductor Hermann Max leads Das Kleine Konzert and the singing group Rheinische Kantorei in 10 concerti, which uses a variety of singers in frontline combinations. Tunder must have had some good basses in his chorus, as they have most of the hardest music in the Concerti, and five of these ten works are sung by bass or basses alone. Both men used here, Ekkehard Abele and Yoshitaka Ogasawara, do an excellent job. The string parts are crisp and do not dawdle, and Max never allows the music to get too grandiose, wisely keeping it within the boundaries of the chamber idiom to which it belongs. The music is never ornately busy and has a relaxed, soothing effect.

The music of Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707) has been described as 'a lot like J. S. Bach's, only less so.' Indeed, Buxtehude was probably the most important single influence on Bach, who is said to have walked more than 200 kilometres, at the age of 15, to hear Buxtehude play the organ. The similarity in their organ compositions is unmistakable, though Bach's are ultimately more complex and subtler in their counterpoint. Nevertheless, anyone who loves Bach's organ music will find this recording a real pleasure. Volker Ellenberger plays the grand-sounding organ of the Evangelical Lutheran City Church in Buckberg with a sure feel for the composer's language and aesthetic. The chorale preludes are particularly engaging and played with special sensitivity.

Sublime musical expression does not necessarily proceed from serene spirits whose philosophical loftiness leaves them unmoved by the push and shove of the marketplace. Prefaces to printed editions of music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seldom reveal much of the personality behind the writer's effusive urge to prostrate himself before the dedicatee and his invocations to the muses to make worthy his humble efforts. Robert Jones, Tobias Hume and John Dowland were exceptions in this regard and often used their printed prefaces as a platform for polemics, self-defence and bile. In so doing they illumine the contemporary pressures of public opinion and changing fashions, as well as highly individual — not to say curmudgeonly — natures.

For many years now, I have been playing piano transcriptions in my recitals, and the programme on this disc was originally devised for my concert at the Valletta Baroque Music Festival in Malta in January 2020. I have special affinity with many of the pieces, but here I will share just a couple. One is my own transcription of the aria “Erbarme Dich, mein Gott”, which I first performed at a Preface concert entitled “Homage to Toru Takemitsu”. As I explained on that occasion, Takemitsu loved this aria; he would play it every time he set to work on a new composition, and also by chance he heard this piece on the radio the day before he died. The other piece that is close to my heart is the Passacaglia and Fugue in Eugen d’Albert’s transcription, which I played when I collaborated with Mathieu Ganio, danseur étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet. Until then, Mathieu was mostly cast as a prince, but in this project, he took on a new challenge to perform a one-man play. I still remember vividly how he appeared on stage with this music, naked down to the waist, like the image of Christ on the way towards his crucifixion.

Henriette de Coligny, Comtesse de La Suze, was more than just a woman of letters admired in her time, even by the very demanding Boileau. It was as a free woman that she married for love; after the death of her husband, a second one was forced on her, but, still a free woman, she demanded to be ‘de-married’! Surrounded by expert musicians, Marc Mauillon shows us that her précieux poetic universe mixes tenderness with the most unexpected strokes of audacity, so much so that her verse inspired many composers of the Grand Siècle – and after!

Betrayal, sorcery and one dazzling aria after the next…Ovid's Queen Niobe of Thebes, who turns to stone when her children are slain by the gods as punishment for her arrogance and pride, is the subject of this forgotten 1688 masterpiece. The Italian composer-priest Agostino Steffani languished in obscurity until the opera was rediscovered recently; the Boston Early Music Festival give its world-premiere studio recording with Karina Gauvin in the psychologically complex title role, and countertenor Phillipe Jaroussky singing 'powerfully and sweetly' (The New York Times) as Niobe's husband Anfione, driven to suicide in the face of family tragedy.

First performed at Versailles in 1745, the opera ballet Zélindor is a delightful rococo pastorale which found favour with Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, no doubt because its story about a king who loves a commoner reflected her own situation. Opera Lafayette’s 2007 revival was hailed as “brilliant” by The Washington Post, which praised the soloists, headed by Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, and chamber chorus who “sang with a gusto matched by the orchestra’s rhythmic pungency”. This is the work’s world première recording with full orchestra and chorus.

The Violin sonata in D major (HWV 371) was composed (c. 1749-50) by George Frideric Handel, for violin and keyboard (harpsichord). Other catalogues of Handel's music have referred to the work as HG xxvii,47; and HHA iv/4,28. This sonata represents Handel's last piece of chamber music. The piece was not published by Walsh. The designation Opus 1 No.13 was first made in the Chrysander edition. A typical performance of the work takes about twelve minutes.