EMA Recording & Book Reviews

Elizabeth Hungerford and Andrew Arceci's album "Love & Lust" presents a Caccini song alongside 14 others, carefully arranged for her soprano and his bass viol.

Their playing is so natural and communicative that fans will find gold in every measure and newcomers will wonder why the late quartets, aside from the Grosse Fuge, are considered so difficult.

The Waits, performing mainly on wind instruments — shawms, dulcians, cornetts, and sackbuts — filled the city’s expanding musical needs. Widely hailed as England’s best musicians, in addition to their civic duties the London Waits may have given the first public concerts in England beginning in 1571. This brilliant album pays homage to their important role in London’s musical life around the turn of the 17th century.

Having been composed over several decades, the music in the Eton Choirbook reflects the changing styles in 15th-century English polyphony. So, too, do the five works on this recording.

Warsaw-based musicologist Szymon Paczkowski is uniquely qualified to undertake the first comprehensive study of this subject. The author first describes the characteristic rhythmic and structural features of the dance and the affects associated with it, and traces how it came to be introduced into Germany.

The Ebor Singers’ new CD, "Music for Troubled Times," seeks to capture the essence of those difficult 12 weeks in vocal music by William Lawes, John Hutchinson, Thomas Tomkins, William Child, John Wilson, George Jeffreys, and Matthew Locke.

"Lucrezia Borgia’s Daughter' is an album as beautifully performed as it is researched, and one can only hope that more “anonymous” works get such attention.

The album marks the first time nine of Fiorè’s cello works have been recorded: three sonatas, two sinfonias, and four trattenimenti (“entertainments” or “divertimenti”). Frey’s recording also explores another important genre in early music represented in the Como collection: opera arias with cello obbligato.

These richly resourced essays, organized in chronological order, convincingly re-evaluate the use of architectural space and the distinctions between nationalities, gender, professional status, and class distinctions to arrive at a deeper understanding of the musical practices of this era.

A catchy title for this release might be “Wotan Sings Bach.” Matthias Goerne, who has made an excellent impression as the Wanderer and Wotan in productions of Wagner’s Ring cycle, takes on two of the cantatas Bach wrote for the bass voice, “Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen,” BWV 56, and “Ich habe genug,” BWV 82.