EMA Recording & Book Reviews

Fabrice Fitch has given us a compact yet nuanced account of a splendid period in music history in a book that is as deeply musical as it is rich with possibility.

For a glamorous decade, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife, Maria, stood at the heart of the Roman social world, as they did in Venice during Carnival as avid patrons of the opera houses there.

A significant contribution to the field of American history as well as musicology, 'Hail Columbia!' provides a detailed analysis of popular American songs on the political scene in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The story features one Layton Stolz, a welder turned orchestra conductor whose life is changed after hearing Beethoven’s 'Egmont' Overture on the radio.

Musicologist Christopher Dylan Herbert researched more than 120 manuscripts at libraries, archives, and private collections across the United States and United Kingdom to find this music.

'Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara' brings together Laurie Stras’s decades-long research on patronage, celebrations, and performance in Ferrara, the seat of the Este dukes until Alfonso II’s death in 1597.

The disc, featuring the Israeli ensemble Profeti della Quinta, combines four-part madrigals taken from Philippe Verdelot’s first published collection, which was printed posthumously in 1533.

Working with Le Concert des Nations, a period-instrument orchestra he founded in 1989, Jordi Savall clearly believes he is rediscovering these works in some sense by performing them in a historically informed manner.

The heralded British early-music vocal ensemble hits that sweet spot between forceful and tender in works by Josquin and Noel Bauldeweyn.

Robert L. Marshall's collection draws together essays written over some 30 years, presenting a carefully curated mélange of the best of the author’s old and new work.