Antonio Mancini

This CD offers a glimpse at the work of long-term collaborators Sabrina Frey and Philippe Grisvard. Frey and Grisvard present a program for recorder and harpsichord that exploits the tonal and interpretative registers of these two instruments.

Following our collection of German baroque virtuosic recorder concertos two years ago, Michael Schneider now turns to baroque Italy. Schneider shows just what wonderful recorder discoveries can be made in Italy in addition to Vivaldi's works, which he has also presented on cpo.

This CD offers a glimpse at the work of long-term collaborators Sabrina Frey and Philippe Grisvard. Frey and Grisvard present a program for recorder and harpsichord that exploits the tonal and interpretative registers of these two instruments.

Eighteenth century Naples was not only a creative, cultural melting pot, but also one of the most important cities in Europe. Full of impressive contrasts between decay and splendour, and with an immense artistic output whose musical influences stretched across Europe, attracting many musicians and composers, Naples was a source of fascination and has retained its appeal to the current day.

75 CD box set (with original jackets) is the first complete collection comprising all of Reinhard Goebel's recordings on Archiv Produktion. It shows Reinhard Goebel as a violinist, conductor, music scholar, and founder of his celebrated ensemble Musica Antiqua Koln. Featuring almost 30 years of recording history from the Neapolitan Recorder Concertos from 1978 to Telemann's Flute Quartets recorded in 2005.

75 CD box set (with original jackets) is the first complete collection comprising all of Reinhard Goebel's recordings on Archiv Produktion. It shows Reinhard Goebel as a violinist, conductor, music scholar, and founder of his celebrated ensemble Musica Antiqua Koln. Featuring almost 30 years of recording history from the Neapolitan Recorder Concertos from 1978 to Telemann's Flute Quartets recorded in 2005.

The German chamber ensemble Epoca Barocca’s seventh recording on the CPO label is a turn in a new direction, after six repertoire albums devoted to German composers, including Telemann, Hasse, Heinichen, Schaffrath, and Fasch, and a wonderful disc devoted to the underrated Giovanni Benedetto Platti, an Italian who spent most of his professional life in Würzburg. On their newest venture, simply titled Italian Love Cantatas , they team up with Italian soprano Silvia Vajente to present an attractive sampling of Italian chamber cantatas, mostly with obbligato instruments. Some of the music on this album, especially the last movement of the Vivaldi and the Neapolitan works by Mancini and Scarlatti, is pleasant but ordinary. However, the range of color, affect, and emotion achieved by Vajente and the ensemble adds so much depth and beauty that the effect is Baroque chamber music at its most intimate and satisfying.

For fans of Il Giardino Armonico's flamboyant flourishes and exuberant expressiveness, it's like having all your birthdays at once, being presented with this great Warner Classics 11 CD set. My own feeling is that this "free" approach to Baroque music is at its best when applied to the theatrical music of disc 8 or the seventeenth century Italian music on disc 1. The showmanship and playfulness is an absolute joy in many of those pieces. I'm less satisfied with the interpretations of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, (on discs 10 and 11), which require a different approach, I feel. I like my Bach to be a little more measured and subtle, I suppose. It has no need of the Il Giardino Armonico treatment. On the whole, though, I do love this set and wouldn't be without it.