Emily Van Evera, Sister Germaine Fritz Vision

Andrew Blanch and Emily Granger are a pioneering guitar and harp duo. Both celebrated soloists in their own right, Andrew and Emily combine forces in this beguiling instrumental combination with a synchronicity and charm “enough to win any audience over” (The Advertiser). The pairing of guitar and harp is at once both fresh and familiar, each instrument like an enchanted reflection of the other. Between them, their 53 strings offer a unique richness of resonance and an expanded range of expressive possibilities.

Andrew Blanch and Emily Granger are a pioneering guitar and harp duo. Both celebrated soloists in their own right, Andrew and Emily combine forces in this beguiling instrumental combination with a synchronicity and charm “enough to win any audience over” (The Advertiser). The pairing of guitar and harp is at once both fresh and familiar, each instrument like an enchanted reflection of the other. Between them, their 53 strings offer a unique richness of resonance and an expanded range of expressive possibilities.

This recording is the culmination of 10 years of research by Dr Emily Baines, and it brings to dazzling life the fascinating and effervescent performance style found in eighteenth-century mechanical musical instruments. It contains never before heard transcriptions of music, found in eighteenth-century barrel organs and musical clocks.

La Oreja de Zurbarán – Zurbarán. The title chosen by Paul Van Nevel to illustrate the programme of this disc is a clear indication of his intentions – to bring to life the music that the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) would have heard in the course of a career that led him from Seville to Madrid. Through an anthology of sacred and secular works, many of them hitherto unpublished, fluctuating from archaism and modernity, Paul Van Nevel and his Huelgas Ensemble seek to show how music and painting stem from one and the same vision of the world. Thus presenting the listener-viewer with the keys for an understanding of a period in which the watchword was ‘mysticism’.