Luca Donzelli & Mar t Tarabaralla

A trio of 16th-century Italian organist composers, two of them almost entirely new to the record catalogues.

There can only be one Chillout and Lounge Compilation Series being the market leader and it certainly is the Café Del Mar series! There have since been many imitators, but only one true Café Del Mar. No other album will reaffirm further this very simple statement than Volume 20 Includes exclusive tracks from Nightmares on Wax, Goldfrapp, Thievery Corporation, Rae & Christian, Penguin Café, Moby, M83, Morcheeba, Boards of Canada.

There can only be one Chillout and Lounge Compilation Series being the market leader and it certainly is the Café Del Mar series! There have since been many imitators, but only one true Café Del Mar. No other album will reaffirm further this very simple statement than Volume 20 Includes exclusive tracks from Nightmares on Wax, Goldfrapp, Thievery Corporation, Rae & Christian, Penguin Café, Moby, M83, Morcheeba, Boards of Canada.

Anna Lucia Richter returns to PENTATONE after her acclaimed Schubert album Heimweh with Il delirio della passione; a recording full of Monteverdi treasures, from heart-wrenching opera scenes (Lamento d’Arianna, ‘Pur ti miro’ from Poppea and the Prologue of L’orfeo) and religious music (Confitebor) to bucolic songs (Si dolce è il tormento). Richter works together with Ensemble Claudiana and Luca Pianca, one of the most eminent Monteverdi interpreters of our age.

In this recording Luca Pianca explores the enchanting world of 17th-century French music. He introduces the listener to the unique and refined musical style of the Grand Siècle, where the lute and theorbo reigned supreme.

With rich texture and bold femininity, Jeanine De Bique releases her debut album 'Mirrors' on October 22, 2021 on Berlin Classics! Miss De Bique is accompanied by the renowned baroque orchestra Concerto Köln, with musical direction by Luca Quintavalle. The album focuses on baroque arias and includes three world premiere recordings. Arias of heroines such as Rodelinda, Alcina and Cleopatra, composed by George Friderich Handel and his contemporaries - Carl Heinrich Graun, Riccardo Broschi and Georg Philipp Telemann complete the program.

Thanks to recordings such as this one, the figure of Johann Wilhelm Wilms (1772-1847) is increasingly coming into focus and prominence as a notable contemporary of Beethoven who deserves better than his previous obscurity. In 1807, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung described the Wilms as ‘one of the most ingenious, spirited, and best educated artists’ of his generation: a judgment borne out by the this trio of high-spirited chamber works.

Max Reger (1873–1916) is noted for his devotion to Johann Sebastian Bach. In the words of musicologist Massimo Mila, Reger was an “outstanding crafter of chamber music, who loved restoring ancient contrapuntal forms: fugues, passacaglias, chaconnes, suites, etc.” His 3 Suites for Viola Solo Op.131d – completed a year before his death – exemplify this contrapuntal restoration and reinvention. They belong to a collection of works with an ancient feel in the style of Bach (Op.131), which also comprises music for solo violin, for two violins and for cello. The three solo viola suites all emphasise the polyphonic nature of an instrument that to this day is still considered monodic.

Das Wohltemperirte Clavier, a collection of preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys completed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1722, was clearly modelled along the lines of Ariadne Musica by Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (1662-1746, Kapellmeister in Baden from 1715 to 1746) – an organ music anthology published for the first time in 1702 and probably known by Bach in its second 1715 edition. Bach took Fischer’s original layout of 20 keys and expanded it to a total of 24, thereby creating the first self-contained collection of music written for the entire corpus of existing keys.

This simple celebratory cantata made Stradella a well-known theatrical personality. As opposed to using traditional recitative, Stradella incorporates string interludes interrupting the characters, which allowed them to express emotions during facial expressions and movement, a novelty during the Baroque era. The Concerto Madrigalesco performs these works extraordinarily with historical performance practices.