Daniel Taylor is a Canadian countertenor, one of a group that has come on the scene in recent years and given promise that soon the countertenor voice will be considered less an exotic specialty and more a generally cultivated voice type. Taylor, perhaps more than other countertenors active today, sounds as though he is engaging in a natural kind ...
With its Art and Music series, Naxos has come up with a classy looking way of recycling earlier items from its catalog. The discs in the series don't quite deliver what they promise, but this one does better than most. The title Rembrandt: Music of His Time is accurate as far as it goes; the art-historical essay on Rembrandt by Hugh Griffith is ...
The novelty of this disc resides in its packaging above all; although the music is quite unfamiliar, there are no booklet notes at all, just a tracklist, some credits, and wallpaper-like background with a design evoking human cells. Discs of early music have sometimes incorporated contemporary music, so the contents of the disc itself aren't so ...
Short Tales for a Viol is an aptly titled collection of English solo viol music of the seventeenth century: it offers 25 short pieces (many under a minute long) that are vivid, virtuosic, and for the most part unusually programmatic. A few are pavans, preludes, or dances. These works offer examples of unusual stringed-instrument techniques such as ...
The pairing of Marin Marais and Haydn may seem like an odd one, but the answer to the puzzle is found when one reads the performer biographies and discovers that they refer to exploits of the 1960s and 1970s. These are reissues from early in the era of historical performance, when both Haydn performed on the harpsichord and Marais performed on ...
Centaur's Solo Viola da Gamba presents gambist John Dornenburg in a mixed recital of pieces spanning the core period for gamba literature, from 1605 to perhaps the 1770s. The standout works here are almost from the opposite ends of this spectrum, two short pieces from English composer Christopher Simpson's 1659 publication Division Viol and five ...
The title of this ECM New Series album -- D'Amore -- comes from the principal instrument of interest: the viola d'amore. Despite its long existence, the viola d'amore is still largely an oddity, rarely appearing in any literature at all. Its appearance can be even more perplexing, seeming to have more strings than could ever possibly be bowed by a ...
For fans of the solo viol, the re-release of both Sarah Cunningham's '90s discs of selections from that instrument's rich repertoire will be reason to rejoice. Packaged as a Virgin Veritas two-disc set called Play This Passionate are Cunningham's splendidly soulful, amazingly virtuosic, and extremely ardent performances of viol works from the ...
The title of this album, Consort Music & Airs for the Flute, is somewhat misleading. Julien Martin plays recorder rather than flute, and for many of these selections, his part is so embedded in the consort of strings and keyboards that it hardly qualifies as a solo. But that's merely a quibble about the title; the music-making on this album is ...
An unexpected and welcome development in the classical music business was the revival of extinct classical label Dorian under the combined aegis of Dorian/Sono Luminus. In the 1980s and '90s, Dorian established a strong presence by virtue of its innovative and sometimes controversial recordings that connected early music with some aspect of ...
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