EMA Recording & Book Reviews

The Spanish ensemble Tasto Solo plays with wonderful sensitivity, whether in the somewhat straightforward arrangements or in their charming improvisational approach to the grounds. One could easily imagine that if someone in Henry VIII’s court had played these instruments as well as these musicians, they might not have disappeared so quickly.

The memoirs reveal Ralph Kirkpatrick’s keen and often scathing observations about the harpsichord world, delivered in that unique style all his students remember well.

The members of Ensemble Correspondances seem to get everything right in Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers: easily swinging inégales, perfectly weighted appogiature, crisp articulation of text, and overall dramatic impersonation.

The Choir of St. Luke in the Fields has taken the rather refreshing approach of presenting the Mass in toto, instead of interspersing the other motets in between its movements.

The works Piffaro has chosen for this journey through German and Franco-Flemish music gives the artists myriad opportunities to revel in the diverse colors their instruments lavish on 38 brief and varied selections.

The scholarship of Michael Marissen has always been characterized by depth of research, fearlessness, and a tendency towards considerable speculation. Those qualities are found in the work under review, a compilation of seven of his essays dealing with religious issues in the music of J. S. Bach.

This new album by the Swiss viol consort Musicke & Mirth marks the recorded world premiere of both his dances and his secular songs. The material is at once strikingly new and strangely familiar.

In recent years, our understanding of the development of the Classical Viennese style has changed dramatically, all due to one composer: Johann Baptist Vanhal. While Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven still tend to be household names, Vanhal is not. And yet, as the Eybler Quartet points out on its new recording, he was in fact quite the groundbreaker.

Everyone can get a taste of Pergolesi’s easy way with the Baroque style on this new CD, which couples his "Stabat Mater" with two Bach cantatas in well-performed renderings by the British ensemble La Nuova Musica under the direction of David Bates.

Music from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales is taken, for the most part, from published sources in the 18th and early 19th centuries and expertly played by Montreal-based Ensemble La Cigale on appropriate instruments in what was called, even then, “the Scots drawing room style.”