"Josquin was the most emblematic composer of his time, famous throughout Europe for his compositions both secular and sacred. This recording explores those two aspects of his output, which are more closely related than one might think. Here in a small line-up, Gli Angeli Genève deliver a virtuoso vocal performance that is sensitive and empathetic. With only two voices per part, they play on the timbre and individuality of each voice, and thus create an intimacy and a meditative mood that invite the listener to share with the singers in the deeply moving humanity of Josquin’s music."

According to the obituary written by his son Carl Philip Emmanuel and his former pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola, Johann Sebastian Bach composed five Passions, including “one for two choirs” (the St Matthew Passion). However, only two of them have survived in their entirety. A third one, the St Mark Passion, has given rise to various reconstructions, and the last two, if they at all existed, are irretrievably lost. Of the two Passions that have come down to us, the St John Passion was the first to be composed; Bach had it performed for the first time in the St Nicholas Church less than a year after taking up his post in Leipzig, on 7 April 1724 (he had taken the liberty of announcing it to the St Thomas Church, which earned him a reprimand; he got away with a somewhat ironic letter of apology).

If Mozart gave the concerto of his time its ultimate shape, it is because he transferred to it all the characteristics of the opera aria, giving the cantabile – which he often mentions in his correspondence – most significant importance and transforming the vocal virtuosic runs instrumental figurations. The soloist is a character whose rhetoric gives the orchestral material presented in the introduction a deeper, more intimate and more sensitive dimension. This constitutes the raison d’être of the relationship between the individual and the group, between the solos and the tuttis.

17th Century Wrocław (then Breslau) was one of Europe’s important musical centres. Its three main Protestant churches – St. Elisabeth, St. Mary Magdalene and St. Bernardine – collected extensive music libraries. Their repertoire was shaped both by prints imported from Italy and Germany, and by works composed by local cantors and organists employed in church ensembles. A separate collection of nearly 400 prints from 1610–55 remained in private hands. During World War II, however, they were taken away from the city and dispersed after 1945. Some items have not been found until now. The majority of the prints returned to Wrocław. Numerous manusripts were considered lost until the late 1980s, when they reappeared in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek. They found their way there from Moscow, where some items of the former Breslau library still remain.

The two Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Flute and for two Cellos by Antoine Reicha show an astonishing balance between innovation and reflection. They bear witness to an outstanding virtuosity and art of composition, which revolutionise forms through spectacular, enthusiasm-provoking lines of execution and through novelties of writing that impact their deeper structures. A composer who established a link between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Vienna and Paris, Joseph Haydn and César Franck (one of the last among his many pupils), Reicha can no longer be reduced to his theoretical and didactic dimension alone: his extensive work, still too little known, continues to surprise us.