PassiSparsi are Italian and unapologetically unconventional. This vocal quartet has chosen a little-known Renaissance polyphonic repertoire: the morescas, irreverent secular songs that composer Orlando di Lasso wrote following a stay in Naples. Discover the mystery of PassiSparsi’s black cat in this many-voiced interview.
On May 14 and 15, Les Épopées and Stéphane Fuget bring Queen Dido back to the Tunis Opera House in her homeland, since, according to Purcell’s opera—based on Virgil’s Aeneid—she was the one who founded the nearby city of Carthage. This new production is distinctive in combining the ensemble’s historically informed performance practice with Middle Eastern music and dance.
Created in Basel (Switzerland), in the vibrant atmosphere of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the female vocal quartet Contre le Temps brings medieval music to life in a renewed form. Four singers—two French, two American—and four individual paths converging in a shared sound, always in search of itself.
Between a twenty-date tour in France of L’Avare (“The Miser”), an intermezzo on Molière’s famous play composed in 1720 by the Italian Francesco Gasparini, and preparations for the next edition of the Misteria Paschalia festival in Kraków, for which he serves as musical director for the 2024–2026 period, spring promises to be busy for Vincent Dumestre and his ensemble Le Poème Harmonique.
In the landscape of European Baroque ensembles, Accademia Bizantina and its director, Ottavio Dantone, stand out for their originality and their sense of communication. “The Exciting Sound of Baroque Music” is their motto, and their concerts are guided by the watchword “Liberate the music”! As for the Brandenburg Concertos, they are recording them on their own label, HDB Sonus, in a series entitled Baroque Anatomy.
A veritable compilation of Lully’s “greatest hits”: Carnaval–Mascarade royale, his final comédie-ballet, has never been revived in its entirety since its creation in 1675. Federico Maria Sardelli and Samuele Lastrucci, from the Istituto Lulli in Florence, are presenting it in its first modern-era staged version at the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara.
Music director of the Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri and a tireless seeker of Baroque treasures, Giulio Prandi is the architect of a unique ecosystem in Pavia (Italy). He opens 2026 with the revival of Pelopida, an opera by the Franco-Maltese composer Girolamo Abos (1715–1760), at the Valletta Baroque Festival in Malta. Several ambitious projects will follow, from Neapolitan opera to sacred polyphonies, not to mention collaborations with the cultural institutions of his home city.
In an America where early music remains a scattered archipelago, the ensemble Blue Heron stands out like a beacon. Its founder, violinist and conductor Scott Metcalfe, has patiently woven a thread linking New England to old Europe. “We are isolated, yes—but free,” he says. For Total Baroque Magazine, he tells the story of how it all began… on a bus in Boston, in 1999!
A part of unprecedented research, harpsichordist and conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini unveils a Neapolitan circle of composers gravitating around the musician-prince Gesualdo at the turn of the seventeenth century. A discovery that redraws the map of the Italian madrigal, revealed in his album “Stravagante pensiero”.
With their ensemble La Rêveuse, Florence Bolton and Benjamin Perrot have devoted ten years to exploring English music of the eighteenth century. Their project, “London,” brought to life in the form of four recordings, stands out for its singular ambition: to link the musical history of that period with contemporary movements of populations and artists.
A first: after 27 years of activity and numerous recordings, Vincent Dumestre and his ensemble Le Poème Harmonique are taking on Johann Sebastian Bach for the very first time this December, with the Magnificat in its 1723 Christmas version. But they are not forgetting Italian music either, with a major 2026 project in Rome, Venice and Naples.
