Combine the artistry and brilliant virtuosity of countertenor Drew Minter and ARTEK/458 Strings with a program of vocal and instrumental jewels from 17th century Italy, and you have a recipe for a dynamic recording, bursting with musical fireworks, overflowing with emotion, and splashed with a multitude of colors.

This package, released on Archiv Laserdisc and VHS in December 1993, was recorded a year earlier at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome in cooperation with a consortium of European television broadcasters. It consists of two distinct but complementary programs, the first under McCreesh followed by another under Pinnock. As the notes point out, the basilica is the perfect site for such a program, since it has claimed to possess the very crib in which the infant lay on the first Christmas. For centuries the papal celebration of the Midnight Mass of Christmas was held “ad praesepe,” at the altar where the crib was venerated. Typically for such concert videos, we see appropriate scenes in the basilica alternating with views of the singers and players.

All the music in this programme comes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and most of it was collected by its founder, Richard, Seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745 – 1816). A polymath, lover of music, amateur composer and harpsichordist, musically active from about 1760 until his death, Fitzwilliam created a legacy of exceptional importance to English musical culture.

This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.

Girolamo Frescobaldi brought his two volumes of Arie Musicali to publication in Florence in 1630 and distanced himself from Caccini’s purely narrative madrigals by so doing. Frescobaldi brought together secular sonnets, sacred madrigals, recitatives, arias and ensembles in every possible style; it is this immense variety above all else that makes a recording of the complete Arie Musicali so exciting and challenging.

Absolutely first-class introduction to the brilliant world of early/mid 17th-century Italian harpsichord music, by one of the very best (THE best?) young players in a highly-competitive field. All the big composers are here in about the right proportion - yes, there's considerably more Frescobaldi and, to a lesser extent, Picchi, but also satisfying representative glimpses of vital historical figures like de Macque and Merulo. And ALL the selections are beautiful in themselves and superbly played. Yates is an expert on historical instruments and I think it shows in her discerning choice for this recording - she plays a Ransom & Hammett 1994 build based on Italian c1600 models.

A transformative force in historically informed performance, Ton Koopman is renowned as a conductor, harpsichordist and organist. In 1979, aged 35, he founded the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in the city where he had studied with the great Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt. Drawing on an international pool of players, the ensemble soon gained a reputation for flexibility, colour and expressivity as it explored the music of such composers as the Bach family, Handel, Telemann and Buxtehude.

It is tempting to see the history of music in Frescobaldi's time as a kind of Darwinian struggle between the conservative, rule-bound traditions of the sixteenth century and the freely expressive innovations of the early seventeenth century, or between the prima pratica of contrapuntal rigour and dry, intellectual structures, and the seconda pratica of the expressive madrigal, toccata and sonata with its emphasis on personal expression and freedom. For Frescobaldi, however, the two conflicting styles of composition amount to two facets of the same musical coin, which both shine brilliantly thanks to harpsichordist Hank Knox’s riveting performance on a magnificent 17th-century Italian instrument that is part of Kenneth Gilbert's collection of early harpsichords presently housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres.

Following the success of ‘Arias for Nicolino’, a musical portrait of the celebrated castrato of Handel’s era (A427), Carlo Vistoli turns his attention to Venetian opera of the seventeenth century. The Italian countertenor – ‘a voice […] intrinsically beautiful, strong and powerful’ (Opera Magazine) – has been delving into this repertory since the beginning of his international career with specialists such as Leonardo García Alarcón, William Christie and John Eliot Gardiner. In this anthology accompanied by the ensemble Sezione Aurea, the focus is on operatic scenes and chamber music by the leading composers of the time, such as Francesco Cavalli and Claudio Monteverdi, whose famous aria ‘Sì dolce è ’l tormento’ exemplifies the linking thread of the arias in this recording: disappointed lovers.

Following on from and designed along the same lines as the Guide to Period Instruments, this boxed set includes an exhaustive introductory text as well as a great quantity of music excerpts on the set’s eight CDs. These extracts have been taken from the extensive repertoire recorded by Ricercar over many years, with excerpts from recordings kindly provided by our colleagues from Harmonia Mundi, Gimell, Accent, Alpha and Sony supplementing our programme where necessary. The Lutheran repertoire of the Renaissance has remained for all intents and purposes unrecorded up until now; the tracks illustrating this repertoire together with other excerpts have been recorded specially for this compilation by Vox Luminis.

"Countertenor Franco Fagioli, an exceptional singer with an even rarer modesty, was equal to the challenge of Handel's music in all its facets – the breakneck coloratura, which he is able to propel powerfully and effortlessly in the highest range, but also the profound melancholy of 'Scherza, infida,' for which he knows how to enshroud his voice in the hues of sorrow." This is what the periodical Opernwelt wrote in the spring of 2010 about the Argentinian countertenor Franco Fagioli, who sang the title role in Handel's "Ariodante" at the Badische Staatstheater in Karlsruhe.

Giulio Mazzarino, better known as Cardinal Mazarin, played an important part in the dissemination of Italian music in France in the 17th century. From 1643, when he was appointed prime minister, to his death in 1661, he carried out an astute policy in favour of Italian culture, inviting the most famous Italian composers and performers to the French court. This disc presents a number of pieces, mainly by Italian composers, which became well known in France in the 17th century through Mazarin’s support.

Girolamo Frescobaldi is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of music for harpsichord and organ, and had an enormous influence on other composers up until Bach. His brilliant toccatas reveal an inner world that fascinates today's listener. Frescobaldi's inspiration was born at the court of Ferrara and reached maturity in Rome, where the composer found himself among the major artists of the time who were actively creating a new artistic language. The 7-CD box set includes the four collections by Frescobaldi which, due to their exceptional innovative strength, have left the greatest mark on the history of music for the keyboard.

The successor to Music in Europe at the time of the Renaissance, this second volume in our History of Early Music is devoted to the music of the first part of the Baroque period in Italy, from the Florentine Camerata and the first operas to the heirs of Monteverdi; it was at that time that the freedom of structure characteristic of the beginning of the 17th century began to give way to the first traces of formalism. This period covers almost an entire century, beginning with the performances of La Pellegrina mounted in Florence in 1589 and ending with the final operas of Francesco Cavalli in the early 1670s. The sacred and the profane mingled and met during this period, which also saw the birth of accompanied monody, opera and oratorio, virtuoso performance and the sonata; it is precisely this same mix that we see in the Nativity by Caravaggio that appears on the cover of this set. The musical expression of this Baroque aesthetic is the subject of Jérome Lejeune’s accompanying dissertation.

Around the start of the seventeenth century musical style in Europe underwent a remarkable transformation. During the first decades of the Baroque era, instrumental music underwent a deep transformation, the violin being central in the process. Composers, who were themselves violinists, expanded the technical limits of the instrument, developing a form of virtuosity with the bow that was very swiftly followed by an improvement of left-hand technique. The music for three violins and bass selected for this recording is typical of a XVIIth Century genre which disappeared rather quickly afterwards, although some remarkable works were still to be composed during the XVIIIth century. This selection, which borrows this repertoire to many different European countries, presents some of the most delighful Sonata's, ballets, chaconnes, fantasias, sinfonias and canon written.