Performing Baroque Music

The cello was a beneficiary of the remarkable flowering of high culture sponsored by both ecclesiastical and aristocratic patrons in early 18th-century Naples. In 1717, Rocco Greco (1650-1718) became the last appointed player of the viola da gamba in the Royal Chapel dedicated to the treasure of St Januarius, the patron saint of Naples. Both Greco and his colleague Gaetano Francone (c.1650-1717) produced new music for the cello which was suitable for performance within the liturgy of the chapel.

18 keyboard sonatas from a little-known yet individual voice in the rapidly developing era between Bach and Mozart: music on the cusp of revolution.

Baroque violinist Kreeta-Maria Kentala and harpsichordist Tea Polso's new album ""Polska Pandolfi"". According to the musicians playing on the album, the release combines early Baroque music of Pandolfi Mealli with virtuoso and peculiarly sharp twists to South Ostrobothnian polskas that are almost as intricate and the musical hooks of both are guaranteed to get the blood circulating and your feet tapping the beat. The three-time Emma Award-winning Kreeta-Maria Kentala has studied violin at the Sibelius Academy, the Edsberg Music Institute in Stockholm as well as Baroque violin at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht in the Netherlands, Hilversum. She works as a freelance artist, leading orchestras and performing as a chamber musician and soloist.

Boston Baroque, conducted by founding music director Martin Pearlman release an all-Mozart release Mozart: Arias for Male Soprano. For the project, which marks their 20th release on Telarc, the ensemble has united with the fascinating American vocal artist Michael Maniaci, a true male soprano, in their first recording together and his first solo recording with orchestra. This recording of "firsts" is also the premier recording of Mozart's arias for the castrato voice that gives audiences the opportunity to hear it as Mozart heard it: sung by an artist not only with soprano range, haunting vocal color, and brilliant coloratura, but also with male vocal power. The disc contains arias from Idomeneo, Lucio Silla, and La Clemenza di Tito, as well as the beloved motet Exsultate, jubilate. The recording is rounded out with two brilliant orchestral numbers, the overtures to Idomeneo and Clemenza.

Northern Europe was a fertile ground for lyrical music: it has borrowed many memorable historical figures but is also indebted to it for many masterpieces by Baroque composers. Handel and Bach come to mind, of course, but we would be forgetting the Heinichen, Schürmann, Keiser and Telemann, whose brilliant opera music is so rarely performed. Many of them have portrayed monarchs, terrible or majestic, in their operatic works - roles that, unlike their southern colleagues, the composers of the Septentrion do not hesitate to entrust to lower voices.