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...

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...