Musica Baltica Volume 4 Johann Jeremias Du Grain was on familiar terms with the musical greats of his era. He learned the musical trade from Telemann, who was already famous at the time, and he assisted the very busy Handel with the composition of a festive cantata for the five hundredth anniversary of Elbing, his chosen place of residence. One hears traces of these illustrious surroundings in Du Grain's own cantatas, which Andrzej Szadejko and the Goldberg Baroque Ensemble are now presenting for the first time on this audiophile multichannel release in the Musica Baltica series. Du Grain's cantatas not only represent the very best of their times; they are also extraordinarily appealing.

Christine Schäfer's bright, silvery soprano is a perfect vehicle for these solo cantatas. The adventurous Musica Antiqua Köln supports her in lively readings, full of spirit and animation. Schäfer sails through the technical demands with ease, but she also brings a welcome warmth and sensitivity to the texts. Some of the movements are taken at a clip that may surprise, but the performers bring it off with aplomb. The familiar Cantata No. 51 actually isn't a wedding cantata, but its joyous spirit fits the mood, so it's welcome all the same, especially in a performance of such agility and precision.

André Previn's 1975 EMI recording of Carmina Burana sounds better than ever in this new transfer. The analog tape hiss has been tamed, yet there's more "air" between the notes and a greater sense of dynamic and timbral definition. Engineering-wise, the mid-70s were golden years for EMI, and the rhythmic verve, dramatic momentum, and unbuttoned joy that Previn and his brilliant forces project still pack a sonic wallop. The soloists especially are outstanding. Thomas Allen navigates Orff's cruelly high tessitura with no effort, and Sheila Armstrong wraps her warm, flexible pipes around "In trutina mentis dubia" to moving effect.

Nathalie Stutzmann is regarded as one of the most remarkable musical personalities of our time and one of a few genuine contralto voices.

Alessandro Stradella’s colourful life and eventual murder have since furnished writers with material for novels and stageworks. But he was very highly regarded as a composer during his short life, and made important contributions to several musical forms with operas, instrumental sinfonie and cantatas. This programme features five seldom performed chamber cantatas and two of his sinfonie or sonatas. Soprano Christine Brandes has a light, pleasing voice, and an athletic technique which enables her to circumnavigate most of Stradella’s often demanding vocal writing. But she is stretched to her limits, perhaps even a shade beyond, in the virtuoso, fiendishly difficult ‘Ferma il corso e torna al lido’.

Rare recordings of two settings of Mary’s passionate Easter lament. For their second L’Oiseau Lyre disc, Il Giardino Armonico, again under their director Giovanni Antonini, are joined by celebrated mezzo-soprano Bernarda Fink, for a project exploring the Passion of Christ as seen through the eyes of the Virgin Mary. The two central works are both vocal settings of the Virgin’s lament.

Here are two of Rossini's "secular" cantatas: "The Lament of Harmony on the Death of Orpheus" for tenor, male chorus, and orchestra, written when he was a 16-year-old conservatory student, and the far more substantial "Wedding of Thetis and Peleus," one of many such pieces he composed for special occasions, commissioned for the marriage of an Italian princess to a French prince. Both consist of primarily short, separate, contrasting numbers, most of which would be perfectly at home in the opera house.

For some years now, the South African recorder player Stefan Temmingh and the German soprano and early music specialist Dorothee Mields have been forming a successful artistic team. Especially their second CD, entitled "Birds" from 2015, has attracted worldwide attention. Now the two exceptional artists are focusing on the composer Georg Philipp Telemann who was one of the most famous composers of his time and wrote an incredible number of works in a wide variety of styles and genres. His collection "Harmonischer Gottesdienst" contains enchanting sacred cantatas for soprano with obbligato recorder, three of which are presented on this CD. Stefan Temmingh combines the cantatas with three virtuoso recorder sonatas from Telemann's oeuvre.

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.

'Herzens-Lieder' [Songs of the Heart] – this title would certainly have appealed to the two librettists and four composers featured upon this CD. In terms of music and church history, they all – Johann Kuhnau, Georg Philipp Telemann, Christoph Graupner and Johann Sebastian Bach – form part of the Lutheran church choir tradition.

In 1990, Richard Hickox recorded Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Hodie: A Christmas Cantata for EMI, two holiday choral favorites that complement each other well, despite having been created more than four decades apart. The subdued, folk-inspired quality of much of Vaughan Williams' music remained more or less constant through the years in his choral writing, so even though he adopted a more sophisticated and sometimes astringent style in later years, including irregular rhythms and spiky dissonances that never would have passed in the music of his youth, there is a common thread in his choices of modes and harmonies that unites both cantatas.

Emma Kirkby and London Baroque here return to BIS with a disc of music from the French composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair. An almost exact contemporary of François Couperin and only some 15 years older than Rameau, Montéclair was also a composer working in all the genres current at the time, including that of the chamber cantata for one or two voices and strings, dealing mainly with subjects from classical history or mythology. The large majority used French texts with four Italian ones, including La Morte di Lucretia, recorded here.

Alessandro Scarlatti is generally considered one of the most important Italian composers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But his music, although it has received more attention in recent years, is still largely unknown. This is partly due to the large quantity of his output: in the genre of the chamber cantata alone at least six hundred compositions are with certainty attributable to him.

Joseph Martin Kraus, also named as the "Swedish Mozart", has been many years a shadowy existence in music history. Gluck and even Joseph Haydn saw "a real genius" in his virtuose and nearly early-romantic works. His position as composer at the swedish court under Gustav III. made it possible to have a fix income and a blithe creativity. This CD-Set gives us an overall musical impression about his compositions in all genres: Beginning with the incidental music to Amphitryon, the high virtuos Italian Cantatas, his Symphonies from different life periods, till the early String Quartets- Gluck and Haydn have not been mistaken.

Scarlatti's cantatas are veritable opera miniatures in wich his writing for the voice, highlights the expressive powers of the various affects of love : love the pleasure-seeker, love the tyrant, love the traitor and love the combatant. Voice and instruments are unite in an inventive spirit of virtuoso rivalry, laying bare the passions of the soul.