Most of Ciconia’s eight surviving motets are dedicated to prominent Paduan and Venetian dignitaries of the time, including three bishops of Padua, a Venetian doge, and cardinal Francesco Zabarella, Ciconia’s main Paduan patron. They constitute a highly solemn repertory in which virtuoso singing hides and at the same time reveals complex and fascinating musical structures. Sidus preclarum presents Ciconia's motets in a blend of four to six singers and four to five instrumentalists.

2021 sees the 500th anniversary of the death of Josquin Des Pres, the most celebrated composer of his day. Dominique Visse and the Ensemble Clément Janequin are recording a selection of his chansons from one of the most important editions of his works, Tylman Susato’s Septiesme livre de Chansons published in 1545. This edition bear witness to the diversity of Josquin’s chanson writing, but above all to the melancholy and sorrow so present in his works, and is clearly a tribute, as is also evident in the two Déplorations on his death, Musæ Jovis by Nicolas Gombert and O mors inevitabilis by Hieronymus Vinders. This recording endeavours to present a Josquin legacy, a post mortem illustration of his chanson œuvre, in remembrance of his musical genius.

The Grosses Festpielhaus in Salzburg has been the scene of countless memorable musical events - operas, concerts and recitals - for 50 years. Here is a unique chance to celebrate the glories of this distinguished era. In an exceptional collaboration with the Salzburg Festival, we have prepared a 25-CD box set - 5 complete operas, 10 concerts and 2 recitals - featuring many of the world's greatest artists, in recordings with classical status and others that are appearing on CD for the first time.

We still have a great deal of evidence today about the ecclesiastical and diplomatic career of Don Paolo di Marco, abbot and tenorista at Florence in the early fifteenth century. But we also owe him a number of allegorical madrigals which are perhaps the most innovative, and certainly the most virtuosic of this period. Apparently innocent bucolic or mythological texts conceal philosophical intrigues, political ideas and moral precepts. Their poetry and music still speak intensely to us in the twenty-first century.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team.

There is no shortage of recordings of Manuel de Falla's El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) and El amor brujo (Love, the Wizard), with more on the way, thanks to the centenary of the former in 2019. Even casual listeners may reflect that this delightful work has never, despite plenty of changes in taste in music of the interwar period, fallen out of style. It was on the cutting edge when it was premiered, and yet its fusion of flamenco influences with growing French neoclassicism is irresistible for general symphonic audiences.

The critically-acclaimed ensemble Mala Punica came into the limelight by the mid-Nineties with three illustrious, multi-award winning discs on Arcana, which revolutionized the world of medieval music: Ars subtilis Ytaliaca, D’Amor ragionando and En attendant.

Bamert’s lively direction and the highly professional playing of the London Mozart Players provide Herschel with the best imaginable advocacy, and we may be grateful to Chandos for giving us the chance to hear his music.

The music of Austrian composer Joseph Marx (1882-1964) largely fell out of public favor very early in his career, after the First World War, but he continued to compose in the same lushly late-Romantic idiom throughout his long life. A significant part of his work consists of songs and because of that and because of their shared interest in some of the same poets, he is sometimes compared with Hugo Wolf, over 20 years his senior, but his music is closer to the harmonic conservatism of his friend Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose European career also went into eclipse in the wake of the war.

The critically-acclaimed ensemble Mala Punica came into the limelight by the mid-Nineties with three illustrious, multi-award winning discs on Arcana, which revolutionized the world of medieval music: Ars subtilis Ytaliaca, D’Amor ragionando and En attendant. We have here what looks to be the last of Mala Punica's series on the Arcana label, and the most sophisticated yet. This is based on a program made up of pieces which quote others, and the resulting web of allusions is quite sophisticated, as is the literary style of the liner notes. Quite a nut to crunch.

Monteverdi’s “Vespro della Beata Vergine” was published in 1610, together with his “Missa in illo tempore”. This edition is his first important collection of music for the Catholic service, although there is much uncertainty about how it came into being. In fact, it is a collection of various pieces which were most likely not conceived together as a self-contained unit.

Founded in 1992, the New York-based Brentano Quartet is known for its interpretations combining perfect technique and matchless musicality. Those qualities are even more obvious in this series of late Beethoven quartets with this first volume bringing together the Op. 127 and 131. This pure crystal of intelligence and brilliance will doubtless constitute a milestone.

The Codex Faenza 117 features the richest instrumental variations of medieval plainchant masses and offices that have come down to us, including three pairs of Kyrie-Gloria settings, a ceremonial motet and several sections of a Marian office. Mala Punica’s ground-breaking recording of this repertoire has shown different possible combinations between voices and—mostly keyboard—instruments to be suitable for the repertoire. The program stages five voices and five instrumentalists.

Long one of the finest living interpreters of Bach's sacred music, Philippe Herreweghe here adds two secular cantatas to an already distinguished discography. In the festive Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten and the celebratory Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten, Herreweghe leads his Collegium Vocale, Ghent in performances of rare beauty and great joy. Taking the symbolic roles of Diligence, Honor and Gratitude in one cantata and the scarcely less symbolic roles of Irene, Bellona, Fama, and Pallas in the other, the vocal quartet of Carolyn Sampson, Ingeborg Danz, Mark Padmore, and Peter Kooy performs with brilliant characterizations and consummate artistry.

The title Seelen-Music (Soul Music) refers to the first complete collection of all the extant Cantatas by Johann Theile for soprano solo with viol accompaniment, presented here with the recording premieres of Sacred Concertos by Theile’s fellow Northern German Christian Flor and Instrumental Suites by the Gottorf violinist Gregor Zuber. The composer Johann Theile is of great significance in music history inasmuch as he is held to be one of the last pupils of Heinrich Schütz, who was the most important German-language composer of the seventeenth century.