An exceptional amount of musical activity took place in the court of Ferrara during the latter years of the 16th century, in particular thanks to a remarkable trio of female voices who had been trained by Luzzasco Luzzaschi, the court’s maestro di cappella. To hear them was a privilege that Alfonso d' Este allowed his guests only briefly and infrequently. Their repertoire was kept secret and was finally published — and then only in part — in 1601. The singers of La Néréide here devote their first recording to this collection in its entirety, reconstructing the conditions in which these works were created with harpsichord, viol and lute accompaniment: the harpsichord would have been played by Luzzaschi himself, whilst the three singers mastered the other instruments with as much skill as their voices.

The Art of Fugue, Bach’s final and most quintessential work, while a monument, is far from being a monolith! Here, Les Récréations present a new version using different combinations of instruments that best suit each individual movement, from the piccolo violin to the cello with a detour via the violoncello piccolo; such revelations of the work’s extraordinary variety, from the Stile antico to the beginnings of the Empfindsamer Stil, refresh our perception of this masterpiece.

Born in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, Antoine Gosswin was recruited at a very young age by the Bavarian court chapel, where he was in frequent contact with Orlando di Lasso and accompanied the Emperor Maximilian II on his travels. Esteemed as a singer and composer, he was also part of the violin band employed by Duke Albert V at the legendary wedding of Prince William in 1568. Gosswin would go on to conduct the chapel of Prince Ernest, Bishop of Freising and later of Liège, to whom he dedicated his Newe teutsche Lieder. Extremely prolific, Gosswin produced several masses and motets as well as madrigals and German songs in which he continued the musical developments initiated by his master Lasso.

Marin Marais published his last collection in 1725, eight years after the appearance of his Quatrième Livre de Pièces de Viole. He was no longer playing in the Chambre du Roi by that time and had moved to a house in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau where he cultivated plants and flowers in his garden. He continued, however, to give lessons to people who wanted to improve their viol playing. The Cinquième Livre de Pièces de Viole reflects this image of a peaceful life; today we regard it as the final testament of a musician who was looking back upon his past years as their undisputed master — and which he remains today.

The perfect dancing is memory, tempo, style, how the body is held, the diversity of things and the sharing of space...". So begins one of the first dance treatises in history, written by the Italian dancing master Antonio Cornazzano in the 15th century. To go beyond the steps and figures he describes is to understand the symbolic role of this art, its aim to unite earthbound humanity with the kingdom of God. This recording echoes this universalist vision, following the thread of the first notated dances and exploring the songs or pieces that were sometimes also the source and inspiration of more refined compositions: Estampies and other forgotten dances of the Middle Ages; aristocratic basse-danses that were in vogue at the court of Burgundy; saltarelli of the bourgeoning Italian Renaissance; allemandes and heady branles danced at the revels of François I. On this recording, Into the Winds gleefully explores a great variety of spaces and aesthetics and reveal the timelessness of this art more than ever.

Charles-Joseph Van Helmont played a leading role in music in Brussels during the Baroque period. In 1737 he followed in the footsteps of Joseph-Hector Fiocco and composed a cycle of nine Leçons de ténèbres for solo voice and continuo. Ornamentation in the French style blends here with Italian lyricism, and each lamentation of the prophet Jeremiah is granted its own particular atmosphere. He revised one of his most beautiful Leçons of Holy Week in 1756 and added a solo cello part, also taking the opportunity to compose a completely new Leçon whose galant style surprises as much as it seduces the listener. For these works, recorded here for the first time, the Brussels-based ensemble Scherzi Musicali has here assembled three sopranos and several instrumentalists around a magnificent organ (1775) built by Guillaume Robustelly.

Johannes Brahms drew texts from various Biblical sources for his Deutsches Requiem. As we hear in his choral music, he had a passion for polyphony and was inspired by models from the great Lutheran tradition of the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Ricercar and Vox Luminis have explored this early repertoire with the same passion for many years now, although with no less admiration for Brahms's masterpiece. It is no surprise that some of the texts that Brahms chose had already been set by his illustrious predecessors; it simply remained for us to trace a path through these earlier scores, so many meditations on death, and to assemble a very different Deutsches Requiem: one animated by the emotions of the Lutheran Baroque.

Handel’s oratorio Solomon is now regarded by its performers and its listeners as one of his greatest compositions. This was not, however, always the case. Solomon was not performed outside of London during Handel’s lifetime, an unusual occurrence during his British career. The work had therefore enjoyed only a limited success, although we may well wonder why, when oratorios sung in English had been so successful until then. Could it have been the obvious lack of theatricality in the libretto, or the public’s growing indifference to the genre? Or was he afraid to alienate the Anglican church, given the rumours of lines with erotic connotations in the first and third acts? Here, Leonardo García Alarcón and his singers and instrumentalists offer us a flamboyant version of the work that would certainly have won over the most hesitant of London listeners in 1749!

In nocte consilium - the night brings counsel. Poets have always found the night to be a time of appeasement; for astronomers it is a long-awaited moment to observe the stars and planets. Mystics, however, have spent entire nights searching for the enigmatic signs of a divine presence. This program forms a journey from dusk to dawn and guides us through various nights as described by several composers of the 16th century: we travel from hope to absence, from the sweetness of love’s dream to the chills of eternal night; the clear light of the moon nonetheless guides lovers to their reunion and our journey ends in the light of the first rays of the sun. Janequin, Lassus, Palestrina, Guerrero and their Franco-Flemish, Italian and Spanish colleagues lead us as we explore these nights, sometimes dark and terrifying, sometimes radiant with starlight, tranquil, and filled with love.

“Sigismondo d’India has a “twin”, a “mirror” in music: Claudio Monteverdi. Both men developed, in parallel, a style that radically changed the history of music. A style inherited from composers such as Luca Marenzio and Carlo Gesualdo, but which d’India and Monteverdi were to transform through the creation of new techniques.

Ceremonies, both festive and solemn, lie at the heart of all the works in this program devoted to German music of the 17th century, beginning with music by Heinrich Schütz and ending with Johann Sebastian Bach. These occasional works make frequent use of brass instruments, whose sound is both the foundation and the identity of the InAlto ensemble. This 17th century tradition is reflected in Beethoven’s Aequales for trombone quartet; these are presented here together with their sung texts. InAlto aims to explore both vocal and instrumental music, bringing them to a sort of dialogue.

This innovative program presents an imaginary Christmas oratorio made up of works by German composers of the 17th century. Many of these works are unpublished and come from the splendid Düben collection in the library of the University of Uppsala; they are arranged here in a sequence that introduces the scenes and the principal characters of the Nativity: Mary, Joseph, the Archangel Gabriel, the angels, the shepherds, the Magi and Simeon. These works belong to the genre of the historia sacra and depict the dialogue of the Annunciation between the archangel Gabriel and Mary, the arrival of the Magi — guided by angels — at the manger, and the scene where Mary and Joseph look for Jesus in the Temple.

These narrative scenes stand in contrast to the large ensembles that represent the angelic host, the shepherds, and the adoring multitudes before the manger. The instruments also play an important role in this celebration with their contrasting timbres. This recording features works by Andreas Hammerschmidt, Wolfgang Carl Briegel, Christian Flor, Christoph Bernhard, Heinrich Schütz, Franz Tunder, David Pohle, and Thomas Selle.

Like the Occitan troubadours and the trouvères of northern France, the Minnesänger celebrated courtly love and gave medieval German its letters of nobility. These "singers of love" — Minne is the old German word for love — thus perpetuated a poetic and musical tradition that had begun nearly two centuries earlier in Occitania. The Minnesänger, generally of noble and knightly blood, gradually emancipated themselves from their French models and developed their own styles and forms during the 13th century. We should, however, make a clear distinction between Minnesangand Spruchsang, given that they both existed within the German song genre during the high and late Middle Ages. The two disciplines differed not only in theme and form, but also in their creators: Minnesang was generally the dilettante love poetry of courtly nobility, while Spruchsang was practiced by travelling professional poets and singers. The present program offers a foray through these creative periods and of the Spruchsang in particular: no less than six of the twelve old masters are represented here, notably Konrad von Würzburg, Frauenlob, Brother Wernher, Konrad Marner, Tannhäuser and Walther von der Vogelweide.

Julie Roset, a young French soprano from Avignon, immediately attracted attention with her first recital for Ricercar (Nun danket alle Gott with Clematis) and went on to record a recital of works by Sigismondo d'India with Mariana Flores that met with great critical acclaim. In this new recording she tackles several of Handel’s masterpieces on religious themes: his Salve Regina, Gloria and the motet Silete venti were all composed at the time when the young Handel had been inspired to new heights by his discovery of Roman musical life.

In the eighteenth century, the sonata model established by the published works of Arcangelo Corelli conquered all of musical Europe. Throughout the century, transcriptions of his music were published for every instrument, and the viola da gamba was no exception. The most interesting collection is that held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (MS Vm7 6308), which presents the twelve sonatas of Corelli’s op. 5 in transcription for viola da gamba. Although it is preserved in Paris, certain stylistic elements suggest that this transcription originated in the German-speaking region of Europe, with particular reference to composers such as Johannes Schenck, Konrad Höffler or Gottfried Finger, whose works were deeply influenced by Corelli’s style. It is to this repertory that Teodoro Baù, winner of the 2021 Ma Festival Bruges competition, devotes his recording.