# TopicsAnniversary Baroque CD New Releases Early music festival Focus guests Heritage History interview music pictures of the Week Playlist of the week Portrait Presto Record of the month Records Report Video of the week Young talents
In Paris, Italian violinist Giuliano Carmignola led an exceptional masterclass for the prizewinners of the Talents & Violon’celles Foundation: a day devoted to passing on knowledge through Vivaldi’s most famous work. And an unforgettable experience for a new generation of violinists.
It is an event: a complete recording of the 18 cantatas by Johann Ludwig Bach, cousin of the famous Johann Sebastian—cantatas that the latter himself copied out and performed in Leipzig in 1726, exactly 300 years ago. For the occasion, keyboardist and conductor Johanna Soller presents the first complete recording.
Concerto Soave brings together the two Venite, exultemus settings by Campra and Bernier, highlighting the techniques that shaped the French motet at the dawn of the eighteenth century: Italianate writing, rhetorical contrasts, text-painting, and an interplay of forces that reveals each composer’s unique voice.
Beyond the aurora borealis that have made the Yukon region in Canada’s Far North famous, other lights appeared in 2025: those of Yukon Early Music, an emerging music scene, and a small community determined to promote early music in these freezing cold lands (-55°C!), making a different kind of name for the territory.
Published in 2026, the Six Sonatas for Two Flutes reveal the unique style of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: bold composition based on constant dialogue between the voices, where virtuosity and expressiveness respond to each other with rare intensity.
For the 14th time, Europe’s musical world gathers in January at the Valletta Baroque Festival in Malta. Rarely-performed works, musicians from every country, a highly international audience. A notable event this year: the city, founded in 1565 by the French knight Jean de La Valette, is hosting a fully staged opera, Pelopida, by the Maltese composer Girolamo Abos.
With the 18 Leipzig Chorales, Bach brings together, at the end of his life, a fully realized reflection on the organ, the chorale, and counterpoint. On the Thomas organ in Namur, Martin Gester approaches these pages as a space for sonic invention, playing with styles, colours, and balances to create a dialogue between learned elaboration and expressive intensity.
In Lyon, Franck-Emmanuel Comte and his ensemble Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu explore original paths between early music and other artistic disciplines. A meeting with a conductor whose motto is: explore, reveal, share.
