The Swedish virtuoso recorder player Emelie Roos is a multifaceted musician. Having grown up with folk music, violin, recorder and singing, Emelie is today active as a soloist, chamber musician, pedagog and producer. Emelie has played together with the leading Baroque orchestras and ensembles of Sweden. She has been engaged as a soloist with both symphony orchestra and string orchestra, and as a theater musician in theater and opera house. As artistic director of Höör Barock, Emelie has, together with lutenist Dohyo Sol, managed to create an international centre of Early Music in their small hometown.

Dans la musique baroque européenne, les grands motets sont l’une des formes les plus représentatives de la musique française. À l’origine développés pour la Chapelle du Roi par Du Mont et Lully, et portés à leur aboutissement par Delalande durant quatre décennies au service de Louis XIV, ces œuvres qui résonnaient chaque jour, à la Messe du Roi, furent ensuite les piliers des programmes du Concert Spirituel créé en 1725. C’est alors que vont s’imposer deux nouveaux maîtres dans ce style : Rameau et Mondonville.

To welcome the spring, British ensemble I Fagiolini puts aside its beloved Monteverdi to uncover its own national heritage: the best of John Wilbye's classic Golden Age madrigals. Whilst his oeuvre may have been small (just 75 works that we know of and most just a couple of minutes long), time and again, in these exquisite cameos, Wilbye delivers what might be reckoned the ultimate madrigal experience.The plangent dissonance of Draw on, sweet night and Weep, weep, mine eyes perfectly evoke English melancholy, while Sweet honey-sucking bees and Adieu, sweet Amaryllis are such sheer pleasure to sing that many listeners will scrabble to unearth old scores. This album is, in a nutshell, 75 minutes of madrigalian bliss! Rediscover or enjoy anew this central part of English choral culture, strangely out of fashion for so long, sung by a group that has matured into the repertoire like a good wine.

The first-ever survey on record of the complete surviving output by a significant contemporary of Rameau: a missing piece in the jigsaw of the French Baroque.

James Last, also known as Hansi, was a German composer and big band leader of the James Last Orchestra. Initially a jazz bassist (Last won the award for "best bassist" in Germany in each of the years 1950–1952), his trademark "happy music" made his numerous albums best-sellers in Germany and the United Kingdom, with 65 of his albums reaching the charts in the UK alone…

…I greet this stunning performance as the way to hear this masterpiece. ~ J.F. Weber, Fanfare

There's no shortage of mainstream orchestral versions of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, but period ensembles usually play them as works for chamber orchestra, with their string sections pared down. In Richard Egarr's historically informed performances with the Academy of Ancient Music, the strings are limited to single instruments per part, much as Bach likely expected and probably got, if these concertos were actually played in his day…