EMA Recording & Book Reviews

William Byrd was influenced by Italian madrigals and sacred choral music as well as the colorful keyboard music from Venice. British keyboardist Freddie James puts the English composer in a lively dialogue with the Italian Renaissance, often with hair-raising results.

The canzon-mottetto, a 17th-c. Milanese genre, is a hybrid work that alternates, then combines, an a cappella motet with an instrumental canzona until it becomes a double-choir motet in which one choir sings, the other plays. The Breathtaking Collective and Cappella Mariana join for an inspired exploration of this delightful repertoire.

Apollo's Fire, led by Jeannette Sorrell, has just released possibly the best available small-sized period-instrument recording of Bach's B-minor Mass. This is thanks to their vision of Bach’s concept of the Mass as a whole with nothing amiss: correct choices of tempi, balances of orchestra, chorus, and solo voices.

'Christian Music in Jerusalem' is a notable introduction to a subject that has been largely shrouded in obscurity, a historical blank into which we project our own preconceptions. Author Alexander Rosenblatt helps to dispel some of this fog through an ethnomusicological examination — involving Christian, Jewish, and Arab music — of traditions that continue to exist in the Holy Land today.

Cellist Elinor Frey's playing is known for her vibrant personality, precision technique, and an uncommon dedication to historical practices. Her latest recording, three cello concerti by CPE Bach, conveys both the elegance and the intensity of this always surprising composer.  

Two period-instrument masters, viola da gamba player Lisa Terry and harpsichordist Webb Wiggins, delve into suites by two composers, Sainte-Colombe and François Couperin on a rewarding new album. Their readings are fully alive, marked by rhythmic and melodic nuances.

Eurasia Consort's new album, Music of Paradise, explores folk songs and dances from Tang Dynasty courts. It feels like an unbroken link to a past too often overlooked in the West. For this journey, the musicians immersed themselves in Chinese artwork and old manuscripts from the 7th through the 9th centuries.

Volume 2 of Cut Circle's complete Josquin cycle, gloriously sung, includes motets from the 1480s and the 'smutty' Missa L'ami baudichon. Director Jesse Rodin's startling approach to Josquin moves away from that smooth Anglican-style choral sound. The five-voice ensemble makes a satisfying new argument for how this polyphony might have sounded.

This reassessment of musical culture — particularly religious music — in 15th-c. Bohemia tries to look beyond the nationalist agendas that have previously colored scholarly work on this topic. As a rare holdout for monophonic chant and an area undergoing theological reform in the late Middle Ages, the region provides rich topics for this collection of essays written through an updated lens.

The debut recording from South Carolina-born harpsichordist Gabriel Smallwood asks who made the young J.S. Bach. Smallwood is imaginative and technically assured in pieces mostly in the North German style with its free, episodic forms, its dense counterpoint, and its long, improvisatory flourishes.