Barbara Ease

First Lady of English folk, Shirley Collins meets Cyclobe again on a welcome follow-up to the octogenarian’s 2016 album ‘Lodestar’ then her first in nearly 40 years. Ossian Brown of Cyclobe (and Coil, big Shirley fans) lends exquisite atmospheric touches that help bridge her old world charms into 2020.

Several female composers achieved some slight renown in 17th-century Italy, but none was more widely known or praised than the extraordinary Barbara Strozzi. This famously virtuoso singer wrote herself truly imaginative, compelling music–the wide-ranging, fluttering runs of the wedding song "Gite, o giorni dolenti," the passionate anguish and the unsettling chromatic turns in the melody of "Lagrime mie," the coquettish humor of "La sol fa mi re do," and on and on. For this "portrait of Barbara Strozzi," Catherine Bott gives a spectacular performance, encompassing the wide range (both vocal and emotional) and technical challenges of this music with ease and dramatic flair.

A 17th Century manuscript that was compiled but Albert Bobowski, a Polish musician and orientalist, contains songs of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman court. Bobowski, alias Ali Ufki, was born around 1610 in Poland and worked in Constantinople at the Ottoman court where he was involved with many diplomats,clerics and travellers as translator, language teacher, mediator and adviser. Thanks to his diverse skills and profound knowledge of the Islamic-Ottoman and Christian-European cultures, he became a valued mediator between the two worlds during his lifetime. In this collection of European and Ottoman vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, court and popular music, Ali Ufki switches between languages and music genres with a fantastic ease and naturalness.

Bach’s St. John Passion with a star-studded lineup of soprano Johennette Zomer, countertenor Andreas Scholl, tenor MLike Koopman's reading of the St Matthew Passion last year, this is an intimate, if occasionally idiosyncratic, account. His understanding and shaping of the structure of the work produce powerful results, while an intuitive sense of pacing means the more contemplative sections serve to heighten the main dramatic narrative, rather than interrupt it. Koopman also achieves a sensitive balance between voices and instruments, so that the solo singers become very much part of the contrapuntal texture, and the instrumental parts are given due focus.

An all-star cast featuring Deutsche Grammophon artist Anna Netrebko, Bryn Terfel and Anna Prohaska, delivers a sensational new recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by Daniel Barenboim at the start of his inaugural season as Music Director of La Scala. Recorded live at the opening of the 2011-12 La Scala season, Don Giovanni is now set to be released in time for Bryn Terfel’s 50th birthday on 9 November 2015. It also ties in with the traditional opening of the new season at La Scala – 7 December, the feast-day of St Ambrose, patron saint of Milan.

Another entry in Harmonia Mundi's ongoing Bach Edition, this recording from 1993 exemplifies both the consistently high standard of performance we've come to expect from Philippe Herreweghe and his Collegium Vocale and the astonishing musical variety and emotional/spiritual depth of Bach's vocal works. As usual in this series, the program reflects a theme, in this case the feast of Ascension, for which Bach wrote what proved to be his final oratorio (improperly catalogued as a cantata in the original edition of Bach's works) and at least three cantatas. The oratorio contains both original music and, as has recently been shown, several movements taken from cantatas no longer extant. It's a compelling and inexplicably underperformed work, far shorter than Bach's other oratorios, complete with some terrific orchestral music, two wonderful festive choruses, a tenor Evangelist narrator, a charming little duet for tenor and bass, and arias for soprano and alto.