Wayward Cloud

Did you know that the legendary American maverick Harry Partch wrote music for West Coast jazz icons Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan? They never got a chance to play his smart and funny Ulysses at the Edge of the World, but this 'Minor Adventure in Rhythm' really swings in time signatures that would have made Dave Brubeck blush. So opens a collection of Partch classics that no one has really heard before. His score for the film Windsong was edited for the soundtrack, and though music lovers will recognize the material from the subsequently expanded Daphne of the Dunes, the symphonically structured original is much more dramatically crafted, and is presented here for the first time. It turns out that there are actually Twelve Intrusions, too, not eleven.

When Henry Purcell wrote his one and only opera "Dido and Aeneas" in the second half of the seventeenth century, there was no existing opera tradition in England. With a libretto based on Virgil’s Aeneid and its music stylistically close to and derived from the typically English ‘Masque’ form, Purcell created a monumental baroque opera. On this 1970 multi-channel Philips Classics recording, Dido is interpreted by soprano Josephine Veasey. The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the John Alldis choir are conducted by Sir Colin Davis. The recording has been remastered in 2015 and is now re-released in Pentatones’s Remastered Classics series, which finally gives it the chance to expose its magnificent sound quality.

Les Arts Florissants France's Les Arts Florissants was a pioneering ensemble when the group was formed in 1979, unearthing Baroque works from France and beyond and performing them in historically authentic style. The group's influence has hardly diminished over its four decades of existence; it has spawned numerous operatic careers and has established a successful training program, Le Jardin des Voix. Les Arts Florissants was founded by the harpsichordist William Christie, who had left the U.S. because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.

In the late 1980s, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants recorded a galvanising version of the masterpiece of early English opera: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. This seminal interpretation is now available again, for the first time in digital.

Les Arts Florissants France's Les Arts Florissants was a pioneering ensemble when the group was formed in 1979, unearthing Baroque works from France and beyond and performing them in historically authentic style. The group's influence has hardly diminished over its four decades of existence; it has spawned numerous operatic careers and has established a successful training program, Le Jardin des Voix. Les Arts Florissants was founded by the harpsichordist William Christie, who had left the U.S. because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.

In the late 1980s, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants recorded a galvanising version of the masterpiece of early English opera: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. This seminal interpretation is now available again, for the first time in digital.

Dido and Aeneas (Z. 626) is an opera in a prologue and three acts, written by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell with a libretto by Nahum Tate.

La Nuova Musica is one of the most versatile performing groups of its kind.