England produced few remarkable composers for a period of several hundred years. For virtually all of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras, the country had to wait until the time of Britten, Vaughan Williams and Elgar in the early 20th century to boast their own true greatness. However, if...

The story behind the two composers whose music appears on this Ramée CD is as fascinating as the music itself. Performed on a ten-course lute by Anthony Bailes, the disc is titled Intavolatura di liuto. Two members of an illustrious Italian family, Michelagnolo Galilei and his father,...

I always get excited when I get to hear an album of artists I am not familiar with, which turns out to be wonderful. Simon Ponsford, a young and upcoming countertenor and his father David, an award winning keyboardist and musicologist have recorded a disc of Elizabethan and Jacobean songs and...

This is the fourth volume in the ongoing series by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen of some lesser known sacred music by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594). The main work on the album is Palestrina’s Missa O Magnum Mysterium, beautifully recorded by the choir’s own...

The Birth of the Violin explores the earliest repertoire for the emerging ‘vyolon’ during the first half of the sixteenth century. On this Ricecar album, both sacred and secular examples are presented, in polyphonic settings of three and four parts, or with the violin appearing as...

Full Well She Sang was originally released in 1993 and reissued in September of 2013 on the Canadian Marquis label. The Toronto Consort performs here with nine musicians, most of whom double as singers and instrumentalists, playing recorders, lutes, bowed string and percussion instruments....

The subtitle for this Ramée CD, Le Parler et le Silence performed by The Attaignant Consort, provides a succinct description of its contents: Music for flute consort and lute from the late 16th to the early 18th centuries. One clarification that might be made is that the music was largely not...

An Emerald in a Work of Gold performed by the Marian Consort under Rory McCleery and the Rose Consort of Viols is made up of some of the less common gems from the Dow Partbooks. These partbooks are collections of manuscripts contained in five sets, copied by Elizabethan scholar Robert Dow...

When it comes to the sound of a renaissance band, I have to admit that a raunchier one than is heard here has generally been more my cup of gruel. Give me blaring shawms, raucous bagpipes, rude crumhorns, thunderous drums and throw in a hurdy-gurdy once in a while - the bawdier the...

This recording sets out to reconstruct the sense of excitement and grandeur that surrounded Spanish Easter celebrations in the 1580s at the Church of St. Giacomo degli Spagnoli and the adjacent square of the Piazza Navona in the heart of Rome. At this time, Spain had much political and...

While it might seem reasonable that we should not expect too many surprises to come out of the 15th century, the extraordinarily beautiful and imaginative music of Jean Mouton (before 1459 – 1522) may well be one that is left for you, as it was for me. In essence, Mouton’s music is similar...