Karl Case

At times quite sprightly, at other times ponderous not least in its treatment of dotting and though played with the professional efficiency one expects of the ECO, this recording fell short of medal-ranking when it was first issued. During the intervening 16 years even middle-of-the-road performances of the Music for the Royal Fireworks have become more attentive to scholarship and there are now several excellent recordings of the kind available (not to mention others on period instruments) on CD.

The Schola Cantorum in Basel has long championed the imaginative exploration of early music, creating expertly-researched programmes and encouraging superbly-performed interpretations with a close attention also to the most appropriate recording conditions. Such was the case with Amours amours amours, a disc of lute duos starting from music composed in the fifteenth century, recorded in 2001 by Karl-Ernst Schröder and Crawford Young.

The latest Karl Jenkins release on EMI Classics features world premiere recordings of four recent concertos. Over The Stone, a double harp concerto; La Folia for marimba; Quirk, a concertante for flutes, keyboards, percussion and Sarikiz, a violin concerto. The album is rounded off with the re-recording of the first movement of Palladio, a concerto grosso that Jenkins composed in 1996.