Harmonia Stellarum Houston, opening its fifth season next week, focuses on music from the Holy Roman Empire, often mixing Central European classics with recently unearthed treasures.

Anna Mansbridge’s keen imagination and cross-pollination of dance styles — Renaissance, Baroque, contemporary — has informed her work in Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest for a quarter-century.

Based in the Netherlands, the remarkable Butter Quartet research and perform music from the late 18th and early 19th c., with rewarding adventures into modern works — all on period instruments. Their latest album includes string quartets by Haydn and Caroline Shaw.

With two new recordings this year, the lautenwerk — an obscure, gut-stringed, mellow keyboard instrument sometimes called a “lute-harpsichord” — is having its moment. J.S. Bach owned two of them. Wolfgang Rübsam’s latest recording, of Bach’s didactic Inventions and Sinfonias, is a natural fit for the lautenwerk.