EMA Recording & Book Reviews

Plush and radiant, the performances cast a vivid glimpse of a rich and varied era fit to mark the 500th anniversary of Josquin's death in 2021.

There is so much information here concerning specific meters and their historical development that anyone who can digest it all will approach the music of the German Baroque with new understanding, conviction, and a sense of freedom.

The four-part series sinks deeply into the popular, vernacular, and religious music of medieval Baltic regions, exploring their individual roots and connections to local cultures and histories.

David Breitman’s 'Piano-Playing Revisited' is not an effort to convert modern pianists into period players; instead, the author seeks to enrich modern performances on the modern piano with the insights gained through this comparative process.

"Music and Instruments of the Elizabethan Age: The Eglantine Table" places a focus on the musical items portrayed on the tabletop, for at least 15 musical instruments appear alongside music as it would have been notated at the time.

Ensemble La Notte's new album, featuring works chosen for their titular or thematic references to madness, is fun, enjoyable, creative, and well performed.

Early modern musical incarnations of the 'Odyssey' take center stage in the volume, and particularly Giacomo Badoaro and Claudio Monteverdi’s 'Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria' (1640), an opera that is becoming increasingly well-known to musicians, scholars, and audiences.

This new release, the 67th entry in the series, sees the return of Concerto Italiano, welcomes into the fold the violinist Boris Begelman, and is dedicated to six of Vivaldi’s later violin concertos.

Guitarist Stefano Maiorana explores the rich musical traditions Santiago de Murcia left behind in his compilations, especially the contrasts between the Italian and Spanish styles the composer-guitarist knew so well.

In 1999, the Lilly Library of Indiana University purchased a leather-bound book of disparate works from a Brussels bookseller that includes a music treatise written (for the most part) in the unmistakable hand of Marc-Antoine Charpentier.