Flores de Musica pera o instrumento de tecla & harpa is the only known work of Portugese composer Manuel Rodrigues Coelho. Printed in Lisbon in 1620 and boasting more than five hundred pages, Coelho’s Flores de Musica is one of the largest music works printed in the seventeenth century. Celebrating the 400th anniversary of its original publication, a new edition in three volumes has been published with the research being used to inform this major new recording series. Organist André Ferreira is joined by Ars Lusitana, an early music ensemble founded in 2011 by Maria Bayley, dedicated to the research and performance of Portuguese music.

Jheronimus Vinders (fl.1525/6) is best known for the oft-recorded lament on the death of Josquin Desprez (d.1521), O mors inevitabilis, which has led many to presume that he was a disciple or even a pupil of the great master. Now that his surviving works have recently been published in a modern edition, we are better able to place him among his contemporaries. He belongs to a rather small group of Flemish musicians who form the link between the Josquin generation and that of the mid-sixteenth century, featuring composers such as Clemens non Papa and Crecquillon. He boasts a wonderfully imaginative ear with a preference for dark sonorities, and his music often surprises and delights. This is the first recording devoted to a selection of Vinders’s works along with the polyphonic models that inspired them.

Byrd’s first song collection was published in 1588. In the following year he writes that he had ‘bene encouraged thereby, to take further paines therein, and to make the pertaker thereof, because I would shew my selfe gratefull to thee for thy loue, and desirous to delight thee with varietie, whereof (in my opinion) no Science is more plentifully adorned then Musicke.’ This 1589 collection, therefore, offers songs of 3, 4, 5 and 6 parts, ‘to serue for all companies and voyces: whereof some are easie and plaine to sing, [while] other more hard and dificult.’ Byrd clearly sought to be as inclusive as possible for all musicians, amateur and professional. With the 1589 collection, Byrd’s complete early song collections are now committed to recording. Together they provide a variety themes and textures, as well as vocal and instrumental combinations, demonstrating the richness of Elizabethan courtly music.

The Linarol Consort is joined by acclaimed tenor, James Gilchrist, for this, the second volume of viol music composed for the wealthiest and most influential of German merchants of the sixteenth century, Jacob Fugger, who is held to be one of the wealthiest individuals in history. Recorded from a new edition of a manuscript held in the vast collection of the National Library of Austria, this rare recording champions viol consort pieces from some of the greatest German, Flemish and French composers of the time.

Flores de musica pera o instrumento de tecla & harpa, is the only known work of Portugese composer Manuel Rodrigues Coelho. Printed in Lisbon in 1620 and boasting more than five hundred pages, Coelho’s Flores de musica is one of the largest music works printed in the seventeenth century. Celebrating the 400th anniversary of its original publication, a new edition in three volumes has been published with the research being used to inform this major new recording series. Organist Sérgio Silva performs on the 1762 Pascoal Caetano Oldovino organ of Elvas Cathedral, where Manuel Rodrigues Coelho started his musical studies and worked as an organist. Silva is joined by soprano Mariana Moldão and mezzo-soprano Maria de Fátima Nunes for the sung versos, which are accompanied on the smaller cabinet organ located near the chancel of the cathedral and built around the same time and by the same organ builder as the main instrument.

In their debut album, early music ensemble Fount & Origin present a musical meditation on the Franco-Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden’s altarpiece image of The Last Judgement at the End of time. This multi-paneled work survives as a monument of fifteenth-century art, relating in vivid detail and color van der Weyden’s dynamic and terrifying account of the world’s final moments. The nine polyphonic settings recorded here were composed in Europe in the mid- to late-fifteenth century and include works by composers such as Johannes Ockeghem, Johannes Regis, Johannes Martini and Antoine Brumel, with each piece thematically tied to an element or figure in the painting.

Making their Inventa Records debut, the Linarol Consort of Renaissance Viols presents a recording of German, Flemish and French viol consort pieces of the early sixteenth century. Recorded from a new edition of a rare manuscript held in the vast collection of the National Library of Austria, in Vienna, the manuscript is not widely known by exponents of music of this period. The completion of the manuscript dates to around 1535, and soon after it was finished it was in the library of the wealthiest and most influential of German merchants of the sixteenth century, Jacob Fugger, who is held to be one of the wealthiest individuals in history.