Each week, Total Baroque Magazine brings you an in-depth review of a recently released early music album.
Juvenilia presents the early works of Bach and his contemporaries, revealing their effervescent creativity and inventiveness. Gabriel Smallwood interprets them with finesse and clarity. An album that invites listeners to rediscover the youth of one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.
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.
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.
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.
This CD brings together Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian and the Café Zimmermann ensemble, conducted by Pablo Valetti. It offers a journey through the many facets of Vivaldi, with opera arias and concertos following one another like changing, expressive masks, in keeping with the spirit of Venice and its carnival.
With Pierre Gaultier de Marseille’s “Symphonies divisées par suites de tons” (Symphonies divided by tone sequences), the Cohaere ensemble revives a long-forgotten 17th-century French repertoire. A luminous and elegant interpretation, performed by a young ensemble that has already made a name for itself on the European scene.
With his ensemble Près de votre oreille (“Near your ear“), gamba player Robin Pharo devotes his new album Lighten mine eies to the singular world of William Lawes. Through elegies, psalms, and Harp Consorts, he explores the English composer’s daring dissonances and the shifting boundary between restitution, re-creation, and memory, in a project where research […]
With Natale Veneziano, Giuseppe Maletto and the choir of Il Pomo d’Oro rekindle the splendour of Venetian Christmas music, balancing liturgical fervour with musical daring. A luminous journey into the worlds of Gabrieli, Schütz, Monteverdi, and Cavalli, revealing the boundless creativity of Baroque Venice.
