Gran Consort Li Stromenti

The English composer Michael East (1580-1648) wrote a set of eight 5-part fantasias for viols, acclaimed as being ‘among the best five-part consorts of the time’.

Matthew Locke was the most prominent English musician of the generation before Purcell, occupying a unique place between the Renaissance consort tradition and Baroque chamber music. The Broken Consort refers to a group with mixed instruments, and Locke's pieces entertained royalty with their ambitiously chromatic tonal language and rhythmic quirkiness.

‘Renaissance English Recorders’ revisite près d'un siècle de création musicale correspondant à peu de choses près aux règnes d'Henri VIII et d'Elizabeth I en Angleterre.

The challenges and rewards of performing early music are here vividly illustrated by The Binchois Consort, as creative scholarship comes to the aid of two substantial—but fragmentary—works by Jacob Obrecht, and an audacious recorded sound attempts to recreate the experience of the original performers 500 years ago: an album set to attract huge interest from critics and Renaissance scholars alike.

Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was a rare haven of peace during the Thirty Years’ War thanks to its geographical location. Many people, including artists and musicians, fled there from the horrors of plague and war. Heinrich Albert, a pupil of Heinrich Schütz (his cousin) and Johann Hermann Schein, the Thomaskantor in Leipzig, was appointed cathedral organist in the city in 1630. His garden hut, overgrown with pumpkin vines and suitably dubbed the ‘pumpkin hut’ (Kürbishütte), became the meeting place of the Königsberg Circle of Poets: a refuge and a space for cutting-edge creativity, spared from direct involvement in the war.

The repertory for viol consort of the Stuart age in England consists of fantasias and miscellaneous pieces whose dense, continuous polyphony conveys a sonic and social ideal of Concord and harmony.

For their second album on Chandos, Freddie Crowley and his Corvus Consort - joined by the harpist Louise Thomson - turn their attention to a rich vein of choral music written for women's voices and harp. Gustav Holst was a champion of women's voices and taught in several girls' schools, most famously at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith, where he worked for almost thirty years.

"Specchio Veneziano" or the Venetian mirror – this programme compares and contrasts two composers from the city of the Doges: on the one hand the celebrated Vivaldi, on the other a virtual unknown, Giovanni Battista Reali, who was born there in 1681, three years after Vivaldi, and died in 1751, ten years after his illustrious colleague.

The Kraken Consort was born from the imagination of three musicians, friends and colleagues, whose horizons extend well beyond the baroque repertoire which allowed them to meet: Bruno Helstroffer, a musician whose versatility and freedom make him a of the most requested theorbists of the moment; two lyrical artists accustomed to opera stages around the world: Robert Getchell, a native of the United States, of Irish-Scottish origins, seasoned in the traditional repertoires of Celtic culture; and Chantal Santon Jeffery, a sought-after interpreter of 17th and 18th century English-language repertoires.