This is part of a series of releases on the Naxos label devoted to the 40 symphonies of Michael Haydn, younger brother of Franz Joseph. These have been commercially successful, and it's easy to see why: there's music of unsuspected high quality here, and you can see why the younger Haydn's work was taken for Mozart's in several cases for decades, and why Mozart, who was spare in his praise of other composers, bestowed it upon this one. All four of these symphonies are in the three-movement form that Mozart had mostly left behind by the late 1770s and 1780s (when the Haydn works were composed), but the individual movements are quite confidently handled, with the elegant but harmonically wide-ranging slow movements perhaps the best of the lot.

Owen Rees leads early-music consort Contrapunctus alongside The Choir of The Queen’s College, Oxford in performances of John Taverner’s masterwork, the Missa Gloria tibi trinitas. A virtuosic work, it has pride of place in the Forrest-Heyther partbooks (in the Bodleian Library in Oxford), which it has been variously argued originated at Cardinal College or at the Chapel Royal.It might well have been heard on Trinity Sunday in the chapel of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court.

Music Director of Tafelmusik from 1981 to 2014, Jeanne Lamon was loved by audiences, and praised by critics in Europe and North America for her virtuosity as a violinist and her brilliant musical leadership. Under her direction, Tafelmusik achieved international stature with over 80 recordings to its name, and with tours to over 350 international cities including invitations to the most prestigious concert halls and festivals in the world.