Convivium Cosmologicum

Whether or not by the teenage Handel, these trios are eminently worth exploring. Oboe sometimes dominates violin, but Convivium are full of with and verve in allegros, with slow affective movements - the opening of No. 8 is magical.

English composer William Byrd must have figured he'd lived long enough by 1605, as the seventy-something composer decided to throw caution to the winds and published his largest work, the two-volume set Gradualia, that year. This was a collection of Latin service music, consisting of mass propers for the entire church years in addition to a few secular pieces in the second volume; it contains 109 works in all. Although James I had acceded to the English throne in 1603 with the intention of at least attempting to restore some measure of religious freedom to English Catholics, in quick succession the Bye Plot, the Main Plot, and the Gunpowder Plot put to bed any hopes that this would come to pass during his reign.

"Sacrum Convivium" presents a vision of French music over two millennia: from Gregorian chant through Guillaume de Machaut’s extraordinary ‘Lai de Nostre Dame’ to the Twentieth Century of Maurice Duruflé, Francis Poulenc and Olivier Messiaen, all three of them influenced in some way by the spirituality and sensibility of Gregorian chant, which Messiaen himself described as “the greatest treasure we possess in western music.”

Everybody will know by now that Elizabeth Wallfisch has a special interest, affection and regard for the 17th- and 18th-century Italian violin schools. She has already recorded much music by the likes of Tartini, Corelli, Locatelli and others with her group, The Locatelli Trio, and also with The Raglan Baroque Players under Nicholas Kraemer. Here is a varied and fascinating collection of pieces by some of the lesser-known composers from a generation or two earlier than those composers.