Each week, Total Baroque Magazine brings you an in-depth review of a recently released early music album.
What might life have been like for a violin consort in sixteenth-century Venice? For its debut album, La Capriola imagines an evening around St Mark’s Square, from the basilica to the palaces and then on to the taverns. Willaert, Rore, Gabrieli and Bendusi punctuate a journey in which sacred music, madrigals, dances and songs reveal the many faces of what was still a relatively new instrument.
As Handel shaped the English oratorio in London, he did not turn his back on the great Italian opera stars, even adapting his scores to suit their voices. With “Handel’s Italians”, Carlo Vistoli, Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d’Astrée bring these tailor-made versions back to life.
Why is Rameau holding a violin in one of his rare portraits? Taking this mystery as their starting point, Théotime Langlois de Swarte and William Christie explore the instrument’s little-known place in the composer’s world. From operatic transcriptions and dances to sonatas by his contemporaries, an intimate portrait of Rameau in which the violin becomes by turns singer, dancer and actor.
Why did the young Bach travel several hundred kilometres to hear Buxtehude in Lübeck? On their second album, the Chœur & Ensemble Poséidon trace the roots of his musical language, setting the cantata BWV 150 alongside works by the older composer he so admired, with Johann Kuhnau also entering the conversation. A journey into the musical world of Germany around 1700, when the future Cantor’s style was still taking shape.
Twenty years after a first recording that became a landmark in the viola da gamba discography, Lucile Boulanger and Les Lucioles pick up the thread cut short by the death of Sophie Watillon. From July to December, from summer to autumn, they complete Christopher Simpson’s two great cycles in an album conceived both as a tribute and as a fresh take on the English art of ‘division’.
In 1582, Pomponio Nenna (1556–1608) was 26 years old, and his first book of madrigals continued to celebrate the light, the festivals, and the landscapes of Puglia. Long before the dissonances that would link his name to that of Gesualdo, the composer displayed a lively and refined polyphony in these works. With his ensemble Comet Musicke, Francisco Javier Mañalich Raffo now presents the first complete recording of this work.
After the “Missa Tu es Petrus” in 2023 and the “Missa Benevola” in 2024, I Fagiolini and Robert Hollingworth bring their wide-ranging rediscovery of Orazio Benevoli, master of the spectacular Roman polychoral style of the seventeenth century, to a close with this third album. Two further world-premiere recordings, for three and four choirs respectively, on a release already shortlisted for the 2026 Gramophone Awards.
Three sacred narratives, three figures confronted with absence: through Purcell, Ferrandini and Charpentier, Camille Delaforge and Il Caravaggio explore fear, doubt and solitude in their most deeply human forms. An album shaped by a ‘theatre of abandonment’ as spare as it is intense.
Little known today, Pierre de Manchicourt was nevertheless one of the leading polyphonists of the 16th century. Thirty years after recording his music with Paul Van Nevel, Stephan MacLeod returns to Manchicourt with Gli Angeli Genève in an album conceived as both a rediscovery and a tribute.
With “Folías y Glosas”, Concerto Scirocco brings to life the instrumental world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. From ministriles and dances to ostinato basses and improvised variations, Giulia Genini leads Cabezón, Ortiz, Falconieri and Praetorius through a programme in which forms travel, transform and constantly change colour.
The music of Bach’s “Köthener Trauermusik”, composed for the funeral of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen in 1729, has been lost, but the libretto and many details of the ceremony survive. Solomon’s Knot presents a new reconstruction by Chad Kelly, drawing in particular on the “St Matthew Passion” and the “Trauerode BWV 198”.
Why does an album devoted to Antonio Caldara also feature Legrenzi, Vivaldi, Biber, Muffat, Fux and even Bach? For their debut recording, The BanXhies follow not so much a catalogue as a journey: that of a Venetian who became vice-Kapellmeister at the imperial court, and with him the circulation of musicians and styles between Italy and the German-speaking world at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
