His life, shrouded in mystery, offers plenty of room for speculation and fantasy: Large parts of Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli's biography lie in unexplored and now probably also unexplorable darkness; he appears in various places, first secured in Innsbruck in 1660, then in Upper and Central Italy, he is preceded by a legendary reputation as a violin virtuoso, he publishes violin works, apparently without worrying about a stringent opus narrative, and it probably comes to a dramatic climax when he kills a fellow musician in a dispute in Messina in 1675 and then flees to France and finally to Madrid. His sonatas are no less fascinating: To many they did indeed seem 'baroque', i. e. overloaded and bizarre, but today we recognise in them a fascinating link between the virtuoso Italian and the southern German-Austrian baroque instrumental style, with it's typical harsh contrasts and surprise effects. Daniel Sepec and his colleagues present them with their usual precision.

Nur wenige Werke der Musikgeschichte erfreuen sich so großer Beliebtheit wie die 1850 wiederentdeckten Sechs Brandenburgischen Konzerte von Johann Sebastian Bach. Diese dem Markgrafen Christian Ludwig von Brandenburg gewidmeten Konzerte wurden von der Hofkapelle München unter der musikalischen Leitung von Rüdiger Lotter in einer erfrischenden Interpretation neu eingespielt und bestechen durch ihre straffen Tempi. Zahlreiche bekannte Solisten wie Dorothee Oberlinger, Hille Perl, Rüdiger Lotter u. a. brillieren in den von Bach untereinander sehr unterschiedlich instrumentierten Konzerten.

Jacopo Peri, Medici court musician and famed tenor, was among the earliest of opera composers. “Il Zazzerino” (the blond one) was also a pioneer in the popularization of the “new style” solo song, and with the 1609 publication of his collection La varie musiche he demonstrated his versatility as a composer, creating new music for a new age.

Viele versuchen es, aber wenige erreichen es: das Kunststück, als Popkünstler und Alte-Musik-Experten zu gleicher Zeit authentisch zu wirken. Dass sie zu denen gehört, die es erreicht hat, macht Hille Perl zur Ausnahmekünstlerin. Mögen sie und ihr Partner Lee Santana sich auch inszenieren – in ihrem Spiel gelingt der stets schwarz gekleideten Rotweinliebhaberin eine so vollkommen natürliche Verbindung zwischen Sinnlichkeit und melancholischer Endzeitbetrachtung, dass moderne und barocke Lebenslust, heutige Weltflucht und barockes Memento mori zu einem Lebensgefühl zu verschmelzen scheinen.

"As the progenitor of a style whose influence more or less came to define the in- strumental music of the High Baroque, Arcangelo Corelli (1653 - 1713) occupies a position in music history as unenviable as it is to his great credit. Just what made Corelli’s style seem strikingly novel to his contemporaries is a tricky question. To be sure, his standardization and popularization of certain formal tropes – most notably the succession of movement types in Sonate da Camera and Sonate da Chiesa – was a significant part of what his followers considered the ‘Corellian’ manner.

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.

This plunge into the steady stream of Biber releases comes from violinist Anton Steck, an alumnus of the Musica Antiqua Köln period-instrument group. Austria's Heinrich Ignaz von Biber was a brilliant, iconoclastic violinist and composer of the late seventeenth century, hardly known 25 years ago but now the recipient of attention from violinists and casual listeners alike. His Mystery Sonatas collectively depict the Passion story through the unique device of scordatura, or retuning of the violin, which forces the instrument into strange, unearthly textures and moods.

Mit ihrem Dowland-Album "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" landete die Gambistin Hille Perl vor zwei Jahren einen großen Erfolg. Die CD stieg gleich nach Erscheinen in die Klassik-Charts ein und sorgte für ein begeistertes Medien-Echo. Das Magazin Rondo kürte sie zur CD des Monats: "Das Zusammenspiel von Mields und Perl hat in seiner sinnlichen Ausstrahlungskraft etwas Tranceartiges." Für den Berliner Tagesspiegel ist es das "ultimative Dowland-Album."

Leonard Cohen, who liked to call himself a 'chansonnier,' grew up in French‐speaking Montreal, Canada. He is appreciated both as a poet and for his sensitivity to combining words and music. This project connects Cohen musically and poetically with previous generations of songwriters. Orlando di Lasso's famous 16th century chanson Susanne un jour meets Cohen's Suzanne. Josquin des Prez's Adieu mes amours or courtly dances published by Pierre Attaingnant in Paris in 1529 combine with Cohen's songs and the eras converge. With knowledge of Renaissance musical practices, new diminutions on Cohen's music emerge, including original chordal accompaniments for viola da gamba or lute based on late 16th and 17th century models.

The legendary label, deutsche harmonia mundi, releases a special 50 CD boxset featuring star performers such as Hille Perl, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Dorothee Oberlinger, Simone Kermes, and Nuria Rial and more! This collection displays the sheer variety available from the dhm archive. A perfect collection ranging Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic music.