The present recording constitutes more than just a new version of the Vespers. It is the first recording of the Vespers in the alternative version proposed by the composer, without concertato instruments. It reveals the underlying matrix of the work we all know, the 'original version' to which Monteverdi added concertato instruments for use in large-scale performances. Respecting the structure of the Office of Vespers, Ludus Modalis has chosen to frame the psalms with the antiphons corresponding to a Marian ceremony. The interpretation proposed here is one influenced by the Renaissance tradition. It places the work in perspective in a musical world at the point of equilibrium between prima and seconda prattica, between the achievements of tradition and the contributions of modernity. Ludus Modalis is a professional ensemble of five to twelve singers formed around the tenor Bruno Boterf. The group focuses principally on polyphonic Renaissance and early Baroque repertoire, with incursions into contemporary music. Apart from the absence of a conductor in the standard sense, the ensemble's specificity and it's 'sound blend' are the fruits of thoroughgoing attention to the parameters of a cappella polyphony: the development of an intonation aimed towards achieving a clarity of harmonic intervals; the attention paid to the text on the basis of the declamation and historical pronunciation; and the richness of the sonority achieved through the use of a variety of vocal timbres and colors, as well as a subtle mix of female, male, and even children's voices.

The Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo in Florence conserves a manuscript entitled Campione dei Beni which once served to record church properties. However, it's parchment leaves originally belonged to a music manuscript compiled around 1420 in Florence. The musical notation was scraped off in order to make room for the new content. For a long time the remains of the musical notation were considered unreadable. It is only recently that scholars and scientists from the University of Hamburg have been able to render the original manuscript legible again by using the latest multispectral imaging technology. The San Lorenzo Palimpsest, as the collection is known today, is an invaluable source of mainly Italian secular polyphonic music composed in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It turned out to contain not only new readings of compositions known from other contemporary manuscripts, but also, and more importantly, completely unknown pieces by such Florentine composers as Giovanni Mazzuoli and his son Piero. La Morra breathes new life into these long-forgotten musical treasures, the majority of which are recorded here for the first time.

Classical Music

In order to bring back to life the many famous or less well-known gems of the manuscript Stralsund MS 229, the founder of Schola Stralsundensis, Antonie Schlegel, and it's musical director, Maurice van Lieshout have tirelessly researched and compared sixteenth-century manuscript and printed scores all over Europe. This includes world premiere recordings.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Johann Sebastian Bach never intended to compose flute sonatas or partitas in sets of 6 or 12, as was customary at the time (and as he himself did for violin, cello and harpsichord). Bach's flute sonatas evolved over a roughly 30-year period between c.1717-1747 as he encountered the different types of flute in fashion at the time, and met several greatly skilled flautists. The question of which flautist and flute makers Bach may have known played a decisive role in choosing the program on this recording. In preparation, Frank Theuns compared and assessed the playing qualities of various early eighteenth-century flute types. Eventually, he decided on a copy of a flute made by Pierre Gabriel Buffardin. The balanced, brilliant, Italianate sound of this instrument was a perfect match for the demands of this repertoire. As well as being an unequalled flautist and an accomplished composer, Buffardin was also a renowned flute maker whom Bach may have met in Dresden in 1717.

With Cupid's assistance, the sculptor Pygmalion brings his beloved creation to life. This recording treats us to two versions of the celebrated story. Jean-Philippe Rameau's familiar one act opera Pigmalion, in which the deus ex machina fulfils Pygmalion's desires, is followed by Georg Benda's little-known gem of the same name: a gripping monodrama for spoken voice and orchestra in which we can imagine the sculptor undergoing an inner conflict between desire and reality. Rising star Korneel Bernolet conducts his Apotheosis Orchestra and a group of young vocal partners: the Canadian haute-contre Philippe Gagn� sings the passionate Pigmalion in Rameau's op�ra-ballet, alongside Lieselot de Wilde as his wife C�phise and Caroline Weynants as the divine Amour. Morgane Heyse performs the role of the enchanted Statue in both versions. German bass-baritone Norman D. Patzke makes his debut as voice actor for Benda's monodrama.

The Moravian-born multi-instrumentalist and composer Gottfried Finger is often found in the footnotes in modern music histories, yet during his lifetime few other composers could boast of the number of firsts and career milestones. In a varied and active career spanning more than half a century, he crossed paths with some of the leading composers of his day (Biber, Purcell, Telemann, Silvius Leopold Weiss and perhaps Fran�ois Couperin, to name just a few). Finger could switch with great ease between faithful versions of the dominant French and Italian styles, but thanks to his experiences across such wide geographies, variety of musical styles, languages and cultures, his primary style is a truly pan-European phenomenon. Although Italian music was his main inspiration, it is difficult to assign Finger consistently to any kind of national style or regional school. This album presents premieres of 12 pieces from the second half of his career show-casing some of the breathtaking scope and scale of his output and his particular strength in deft handling of ear-tickling instrumental sonorities and virtuosity.

La Serenissima's imposing standing in music history is reaffirmed again and again through the continuous presence of some of it's greatest composers and musical works in concert and radio programs throughout the world. Ines d'Avena and Claudio Ribeiro wanted to have a different look at the repertoire, discover 'new' music and perhaps add a small, new piece to the musical puzzle. In the autumn of 2018, they spent forty days in Venice exploring a number of musical archives. Among their new finds- six anonymous manuscript sonatas per flauto as well as for solo harpsichord, displaying the melodic freshness and rhythmic vivacity that is so appreciated in this repertoire- is also a newly discovered work by Vivaldi, all presented here as a world premiere. The exciting result of their research was recorded at a historic venue, the Sala della Musica dell'Ospedaletto in Venice.

No eighteenth-century composer was so adept at so many musical styles as Georg Philipp Telemann. Telemann's versatility and inventiveness kept his musical style avant-garde during his entire life. He was not only praised by his contemporaries but was highly respected by the next generation: his fame was immense. Therefore New Collegium, one of the promising ensembles of the younger generation, has chosen for their first album on the Ramée label to show Telemann the chameleon, the breadth of his musical palette. Some of the pieces will undoubtedly sound familiar; others, such as the Italianate Trio for violin and cello obbligato, or the pastoral Trio for two violins in scordatura, will surely be delightful, new surprises for many. Coming in and out of disguise with Telemann’s chameleonic notes we often find ourselves wondering: is this truly music by just one composer, not six?

Giovanni Benedetto Platti was born in northern Italy and spent some of his youth in Venice, where his father was a violetta player at St Mark’s, before he received his court appointment as an oboist and violinist at the court chapel of Würzburg in 1722. Two years later, the music-loving and cello-playing count of Schönborn, Rudolf Franz Erwein, had managed to secure him as a musician for his own household at his small residence in the county of Wiesentheid. Platti composed - in addition to his ordinary ouptut for worldly and spiritual occasions - for the cello, the Count’s favourite instrument: a dozen sonatas, 28 concerti, 6 duets and over 21 trio sonatas in which the two melodic instruments are not playing at the same height. The music collection of the counts of Schönborn-Wiesentheid very probably consists of Erwein’s personal music library and is today an important historical music archive. Radio Antiqua present in partly world premiere six trio sonatas from that collection, which the count could presumably have played with Platti.

If music be the food of love, play on we read in Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night. Play on - but what music should we play? No playwright in world literature has inspired more musical settings by important composers over the centuries than Shakespeare. It is clear that music's role in Shakespeare's plays can hardly be overestimated. His stage directions call not only for song but also for instrumental sennets and tuckets - sonatas and toccatas. In this recording, Hannah Morrison, Marnix de Cat and the Hathor Consort bring to life a wealth of sensual Renaissance sounds from the time of Elizabeth I in pieces that could well have been performed at the Globe Theatre.

The 18th century had a dynamic musical scene in which much experimentation went alongside respect for accepted traditions. A wide range of hybrid forms emerged in the wake of the French dance suite and the new Italian solo sonata: not only sonatas with divergent forms and suites in which French character titles suddenly gave way to Italian tempo indications, but also everything in between. Korneel Bernolet here presents an anthology of European 'compiled' sonatas in the form of or derived from suites, alongside contrasting compositions that sought the true sonata form. He plays the Joannes Daniel Dulcken magisterial 1747 single-keyboard harpsichord, whose ambassador and titular player he is.

Three instruments, three emblematic works, and three excellent soloists! With Sophie Gent on violin, Frank Theuns on traverso and Bertrand Cuiller on harpsichord, Les Muffatti offer a fresh interpretation of Bach's Triple Concerto, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and the Orchestral Suite in B minor. They provide a variety of orchestral textures, appropriate to the more soloistic style in the Brandenburg Concerto, and the alternating ripieno-tutti settings in the Triple Concerto and the Suite.

While the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto was composed during Bach's time in Köthen and can be regarded as the first piano concerto ever written, the other two works date from his later years in Leipzig. In these works, Bach exploits the full range of compositional possibilities he had acquired during his lifetime; the highly individual combination of contrapuntal artistry and heightened expressiveness already points to the works composed in the last years of his life.

Les Muffatti have been one of the leading artists on the Ramée label from its beginnings; this, their tenth album for Ramée, also marks the label’s 20th anniversary.

This double album accompanies the eponymous book by Anthony M. Cummings, Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250-1750 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 2023). They are designed to enable readers and listeners to enter the sound world of late-medieval and early-modern Florence. Despite the enviable place Florence occupies in the historical imagination, its music-historical importance is not as well-understood as it should be. Yet if Florence was the city of Dante Alighieri, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Galileo Galilei, it was also the birthplace of the Renaissance madrigal, opera, and the piano.

Our goal in assembling this set of recordings, which survey the principal surviving genres of music in Florence in the half-millennium between c. 1250 and c. 1750, was to provide a “virtual” evocation of the extraordinary musical culture of golden-age Florence, one of unsurpassed importance. Through the integration of the contents of the book and the CDs, and leveraging text, image, musical notation, and sound, we offer our listeners the possibility of a fascinating metaphoric time travel.

Eugène Godecharle was director of music at the church of Saint-Géry in Brussels before his appointment as first violinist in the court orchestra. He was not only an outstanding violinist and violist, but seems also to have mastered the pedal harp; he subsequently made brilliant use of the tonal and technical possibilities that the newly invented pedal mechanism had enabled. His Sei Quartetti Op. IV are notable for their musical and tonal diversity as well as for the particular textures that Godecharle employed in their composition. In these harp quartets, recorded here for the first time, Société Lunaire explores a particularly fascinating sound world; their energetic allegros as well as melancholy and galant movements enrich the chamber music repertoire of the second half of the 18th century in a most elegant and charming manner.