Glossa is now introducing into its catalogue one of the most sought-after titles from the now defunct Symphonia label and a recording replete with poetry and expertise. The graceful airs de cour of Pierre Guédron - who worked in the courts of the French kings Henri IV and Louis XIII at the beginning of the 17th century - are interspersed here with lute preludes by leading exponents of the instrument at the time, such as Robert Ballard and Nicolas Vallet. Soprano Claudine Ansermet and lutenist Paolo Cherici conjure up a recital of singular beauty which takes us back to the world of those early aristocratic salons, such as that of the Marquise de Rambouillet, one which was known throughout Europe as a centre of the highest order for literature, poetry and music.

In Baroque opera the dramatic figure of Gaius Julius Caesar received a considerable amount of attention from librettists and composers alike, and not just from G.F. Handel working with Nicola Francesco Haym. With Giulio Cesare, a Baroque hero, Raffaele Pe creates a full recital devoted to the Ancient Roman warrior and Dictator of the Republic, drawn from operas spanning the length of the eighteenth century. With refined musicality and artistry the countertenor Pe approaches roles demonstrating contrasting personality traits of the Caesar who was capable not only of heroic acts but also of compassion, of amorous exhilaration, of physical and emotional fragility. The sweep of the eighteenth century encompassed by these compositions also embraced the onstage heyday of the castratos: including Felice Salimbeni, Senesino, Cusanino, Sciroletto and Gasparo Pacchiarotti – demanding from Raffaele Pe great agility in covering both contralto and soprano castrato tessituras. Alongside excerpts from Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto there are arias from works which Pe has been working onto provide modern performing scores together with scholar Valentina Anzani such as by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo, Niccolò Piccinni, Geminano Giacomelli andFrancesco Bianchi. Pe is accompanied here by La Lira di Orfeo directed by Luca Giardini, in this, their debut recording.

Classical Music

Classical Music

With the release of the sacred oratorio La Santissima Trinità by Gaetano Veneziano, dating from 1693, Antonio Florio and I Turchini present a further significant rediscovery in their exploration of Neapolitan music from the Baroque. Gaetano Veneziano has been known for his liturgical music but until now it has been almost impossible to appreciate any of the larger-scale compositions that this favourite pupil of Francesco Provenzale was known to have written. Like his near contemporary Alessandro Scarlatti, Veneziano was frequently called upon to produce music for religious music drama and La Santissima Trinità (Veneziano termed it a one-act spiritual cantata in the form of an oratorio) is scored for five soloists. For this new Glossa recording Leslie Visco, Cristina Grifone, Filippo Mineccia, Rosario Totaro and Giuseppe Naviglio splendidly assume three allegorical roles defending the rights of the Vergine in the face of the demon, Peccato. The direction of Antonio Florio - at the head of the instrumentalists of I Turchini - once again demonstrates his uncommon understanding of the Baroque world, and in particular that of Naples.

Classical Music

For her ninth recording project on Glossa, the Berlin-based American harpsichordist Mitzi Meyerson is joined by her Finnish colleagues Kreeta-Maria Kentala (violin) and Lauri Pulakka (cello). With this same setup – which they are keen to call the “Jones Band” – they have previously unearthed works for the label by Richard Jones and Giovanni Battista Somis. The new recording is centred on François Francœur, a celebrated member of the Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi and of Le Concert Spirituel in France, and co- director, later in his career, with François Rebel, of the Paris Opéra. The ten violin sonatas on the present double album represent the complete Premier Livre de sonates à violon seul et basse continue, published in Paris in 1720. The writing brings together the elegance of the French style and the energy of the Italian in a perfect blend of both aesthetics, with Francœur presenting his own unique voice in this collection in an effective manner. The music is tuneful and fresh, refined and robust, complete with tender melodies, wild dances, pastorales, and movements of unabashed virtuosity.

Carlo Ipata, inveterate searcher out of unjustly forgotten musical scores, directs Il Bajazet, the important three-act opera by Francesco Gasparini - which shows marked influences of the Roman Arcadian School of the Baroque. Ipata conducts the orchestra of his own Auser Musici for this Glossa recording, made in conjunction with performances which took place at the 2014 Opera Festival in Barga.

For Wilbert Hazelzet’s second Glossa disc the stylish Dutch flute player covers a selection of musical pieces by composers who, with varying levels of certainty, can be regarded as having been pupils of Johann Sebastian Bach: Abel, Kirnberger, Krebs, Müthel and Goldberg – whose C major Sonata was for a long time regarded as being by Bach himself (as his BWV 1037). Cellist Jaap ter Linden and harpsichordist Jacques Ogg accompanied Hazelzet on this recording.

To signal the return of that wizard of the guitar, lute and vihuela who is José Miguel Moreno, Glossa is delighted to announce the release of Phantasia, devoted to Baroque lute music by David Kellner. For this long-awaited return album Moreno alights upon music close to his heart, the music of a composer whose traces have been mostly washed away through him having been caught up in the war-torn Northern Europe of the start of the 18th century. Born in Leipzig, Kellner moved to parts of the old Swedish Empire, settling eventually in Stockholm as an organist and carillonneur, but not until he had "spent the best years of his youth at war", as a military man in the Great Northern War for a decade. How Kellner came to be the composer of the XVI Auserlesene Lauten-Stücke, published as late as 1747, remains still a little bit of a mystery, but these virtuosic and engaging pieces (in fact 17 in number) are ideal - the authorship of some have been ascribed to Sylvius Leopold Weiss - for the mastery of José Miguel Moreno. Not only have Moreno's playing talents been called into to play for this recording - including Sarabandes, Gavottes, Chaconnes, a Campanella (and with reference to his playing of the carillon) and Phantasies - but his long-standing instrumentmaking skills too. And for this recording Moreno built an 11-course lute, the instrument called for by David Kellner.

With one album of cello sonatas by Giovanni Battista Costanzi behind him, Giovanni Sollima has decided to provide further proof of how Costanzi has hitherto been a woefully neglected but exciting compositional voice from that nebulous period between Baroque and Classical. With this new release of Sinfonie per violoncello from Glossa, Sollima demonstrates once more the melodic inventiveness and harmonic liberty to which Costanzi was given together with a virtuoso's capacity to relish the technical demands imposed by a Roman musician who was clearly also a star player on the instrument himself. Together with the Arianna Art Ensemble Sollima has recorded five sinfonias for clelo and contiuo, and a sonata for two cellos by Costanzi where he is joined once again by Monka Leskovar. If the four-movement sonata da chiesa structure favored by Corelli is still apparent in some of these sinfonias, there is a greater openess to the galante style and influences coming from elsewhere in Europe and from across Italy, for all that Costanzi may have no ventured far outside the Eternal City. A new composition by Sollima himself - another cellist-composer - takes off from Costanzi's almost programmatic Sonata for two cellos, "ad uso di corni da caccia".

The rich, beautiful violin tone, and unhurried yet thoughtful tempi of Enrico Gatti have been heard often in the music of Arcangelo Corelli. For Glossa he has now recorded the “Assisi” Sonatas for violin, 12 Sonate da camera à violino e violoncello solo, which it is believed that Corelli wrote prior to committing his Op 1 Trio Sonatas for publication in 1681, and quite possibly when the composer was still in Bologna.

The modern-day appreciation of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti takes a decisive turn in the direction of his church music with this early eighteenth-century composer’s Missa Sancti Pauli given an ideal recording on Glossa by György Vashegyi, the Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra. Conti was a Florentine who worked for much of his career in the Imperial Court in Vienna, generating much attention there – the ever-observant JS Bach and Zelenka were both known to have been attracted by his music. Curiously, it was liturgical works like this 1715 Missa Sancti Pauli which kept Conti’s name known until near to the end of the nineteenth century rather than the operas, oratorios and cantatas with which he delighted the Viennese Court and which have hitherto been receiving the attention of artists and record labels today. If Conti’s church music is less fledgling Classical than his dramatic fare, there is much in the way of melodic tunefulness and concertato style – for both voices and instruments – to combine with fugal-imitative writing reminiscent of the stile antico. The work is a Credo Mass, with its rondo-like restatement of the word in the Credo section. The tone, control, presence and unity of the Purcell Choir have been amply demonstrated already on Glossa in music of the French Baroque – Rameau and Mondonville in particular – and the singers are given full opportunity to shine in Conti’s mass – as are the orchestra, comprised mainly of strings, and the vocal soloists, who include Adriána Kalafszky, Péter Bárány, Zoltán Megyesi and Thomas Dolié. Bárány and Megyesi are also soloists in two additional works: the motet, Fastos caeli audite and the aria Pie Jesu, ad te refugio.

The new stream of performers coming from Spain - who are interested in addressing music from the past - is as equally determined to show off its improvisatory skills as it is to demonstrate its knowledge of the "score"; both attributes available in abundance on the first recording on Glossa by guitarist Enrike Solinís. With his Euskal Barrokensemble, Solinís - raised in Bilbao and largely self-taught on plucked instruments - displays on Colores del Sur a creative openness to other musical genres and styles and a lack of reverence for interpretative certainties. The result is a captivating collation of marionas, canarios, cumbés, jácaras, fandangos and passacaglias drawn from the Spanish and Italian Baroque traditions. Music by Sanz, Santiago de Murcia and Kapsberger provide the starting points on this new disc, along with musical ideas from Domenico Scarlatti and a makam as compiled by the Moldavian prince-philosopher Dimitrie Cantemir (which sees Solinís also performing on the lavta). However, Solinís and his colleagues overlay all this music with 21st-century sensibilities, alive to inspiration from all corners of the globe, not just Europe, and not least Andalucía. The risk-taking adventurousness of Colores del Sur comes, perhaps not surprisingly, with coproduction work from Fahmi Alqhai (whose Rediscovering Spain album was released by Glossa recently), another unquiet musical spirit from Spain questioning the basis of playing music from the Baroque and before.

The dramatic energy and the instinct for colour and meaning in the text which Claudio Cavina has been bringing to the music of Claudio Monteverdi in recent years are newly and richly present in his interpretation of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. Having previously directed much-admired recordings of both Orfeo and Poppea (and a wide span of madrigals too), Cavina turns his attention now to the enduring Homeric-inspired tale of constancy and virtue first performed in Venice over 350 years ago. Conscious of the restrictions inherent in the single surviving score of the work (now kept in Vienna) and that it is likely that Monteverdi was not the only composer involved for the original production, Cavina brings a deep understanding to bear on Monteverdi's inspiration - and also onto the mid-17th century Venetian operatic world as a whole (a recent demonstration of this last coming in his recent recording of Cavalli's Artemisia). In his latest artistic endeavour Claudio Cavina is joined by the instrumentalists of La Venexiana and a superb leading group of singers: in addition to Anicio Zorzi Giustiniani as Ulisse and Josè Maria La Monaco as Penelope, Makoto Sakurada and Roberta Mameli have starring roles (Cavina himself also takes a singing role).