Italy was a very progressive country in the fine arts during the late medieval to the baroque eras; the arts were especially great in Florence! This is a fine tapestry of Italian renaissance music with rich instrumental sounds and voices that can swoon the senses. The instrumental arrangements are perfect and the singers sound like they're celebrating the songs, instead of performing them. Philip Pickett has always recorded some of the finest early music.

This is a beautiful CD. On it is a collection of some of Vivaldi' best concertos played on authentic instruments with light, transparent textures, brisk tempi and real excitement. An absolute delight!

Martin Neary and Westminster Abbey Choir, aided and abetted by the New London Consort, marked the tercentenary of Purcell’s death with this recording, a majestic album of the composer’s music for Queen Mary in life and in death. The Funeral Music opens here with Wood’s transcription of the ‘Old English March’ in procession through Westminster Abbey’s reverberant interior, then in company with the windband marches of Tollet and Paisible and Purcell’s Funeral March. For sense of place, history, and grandeur, nothing beats Neary’s recording. His choir are on peak form in Morley’s Funeral Sentences but hindered by indistinct recorded sound.

It figured that some other prolific composer of Handel’s time would have composed a competing “Water Music,” but Telemann’s half-hour work–otherwise known as an Overture in C–remains relatively obscure. Written for the centenary of the Hamburg Admiralty a few years after Handel’s “Water Music,” it is an invigorating piece of work, consisting of an Overture and nine dance movements with various watery descriptions from mythology that the listener can take or leave.

The Carmina Burana is the most famous of all treasuries of medieval Latin and Middle High German poetry, named after the Bavarian monastery where it was compiled and preserved. It is best known today for Carl Orff's hour-long selection from it's rich collection of love lyrics, student songs and religious poetry written in Latin and old German. During the 1960s and 70s a few early-music ensembles made more or less successful efforts to capture the unique mix of secular and sacred idioms brought together by the original manuscripts.