Pickett

Italy was a very progressive country in the fine arts during the late medieval to the baroque eras; the arts were especially great in Florence! This is a fine tapestry of Italian renaissance music with rich instrumental sounds and voices that can swoon the senses. The instrumental arrangements are perfect and the singers sound like they're celebrating the songs, instead of performing them. Philip Pickett has always recorded some of the finest early music.

A disc of music by the two most talented composers of seventeenth-century Austria and Bohemia is welcome and doubly so when the performances are as lively as these. Philip Pickett and his New London Consort have chosen a varied programme of pieces by Austrian Schmelzer and Bohemian Biber and while I would not advise anyone to listen uninterrupted to the entire disc, taken in sensible doses it should afford pleasure. Schmelzer was born in the 1620s, eventually attaining a position of the highest importance at the Vienna court. Biber was born in 1644 and in 1670 entered the service of the Prince-Archbishops of Salzburg, with whom he remained until his death in 1704. The programme assembled here is culled from various collections and publications and reflects an assortment of stylistic influences and range of colours and sonorities.

Philip Pickett's second recording of pilgrim songs and dances is a worthy successor to his earlier "Pilgrimage to Santiago" (7/92). His New London Consort performs all ten compositions contained in the Llibre Vermell (the Red Book of Montserrat), compiled towards the end of the fourteenth century specifically for the use of pilgrims to the mountain shrine of that name. …