Here Hopkinson Smith, the poet of pluck, takes up five different kinds of lutes plus a vihuela de mano and a Baroque guitar, each of which sounds fantastic in his hands. Whether it's a 13-course Baroque lute for Bach and Weiss; an 11-course Baroque lute for Mouton, Gaultier, or de Gallot; a 10-course Renaissance lute for Kapsperger; an 8-course ...
Harmonia Mundi's Fantastic Style is a two-for-the-price-of-one combination of two great albums by Romanesca: Phantasticus, originally released in 1996, and Schmelzer: Violin Sonatas from 1998. Phantasticus takes as its point of departure an extract from the writings of seventeenth century theorist Athanasius Kircher, who among his classification ...
Anne-Sofie von Otter's Music for a While finds her diving into geographically diverse songs of the Baroque period with the same flair and joyful curiosity that animate all of her projects. She shows a refreshing willingness to change her vocal sound and technique to suit the task at hand, leaving whatever operatic ego she carries with her at the ...
Blind lutenist Matthew Wadsworth's last release was devoted to lute songs by the intriguing but not essential English composer Philip Rosseter. Here, Wadsworth gets his chance to do the grand tour of seventeenth century European lute composers (he uses a lute and a theorbo), and the results are stunning. The disc works well as an introduction to ...
The sacred music on this disc -- settings of texts for Holy Week, from the early seventeenth century and influenced by the new monodic style -- has long been less familiar than the fiery secular music of the era. One may admire this recording by Argentine-born Baroque specialist Maria Cristina Kiehr and still understand why that is: the composers ...
It's hard to say what the name "Catacoustic Consort" is supposed to mean, but this, the group's debut disc, holds lots of promise. These "Italian Dramatic Laments" are soprano solos, accompanied by continuo group of theorbo, viola da gamba, and Baroque harp. Leading off the disc is the Lamento d'Arianna of Monteverdi, the only surviving section of ...
The material on this disc may be a footnote to musical history, but, as anyone who has read David Foster Wallace can tell you, the best stuff is sometimes in the footnotes. La tavola cromatica contains music that might have been associated with a viol academy of early seventeenth century Rome, established by Cardinal Francesco Barberini -- scion ...
This ambitious German release takes an unusual cross section of music from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which is conventionally divided up by composer, country, genre, or patron. Here the Ensemble Daedalus and its director Roberto Festa instead examine a single affect, melancholy, as it manifested itself in various places ...
A sea change occurred in music between 1584, when Palestrina wrote his Shostakovich-like renunciation of secular music in a dedication to Pope Gregory XIII ("I blush and grieve to think," he wrote, that he had been one of the composers who wrote spiritually lowly madrigals of love), and 1623, when Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (an Italian, despite ...
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
![Masters of the Lute [Hybrid SACD]](http://images.alibris.com/cover/m24028ohaol_t.jpg)
Portions of content provided by All Music Guide or All Movie Guide. © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide and All Movie Guide are registered Trademarks of All Media Guide, LLC.