French love songs from three centuries, interspersed with reflective lute solos, constitute an Idylle for mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford. As they explain: “The emotions of love are explored in different forms – languor, desire, fascination, happiness.” The word ‘idyll’, evoking a blissful, tranquil experience, derives from Ancient Greece and poetry on a pastoral theme. Desandre and Dunford spin a thematic and musical thread between eras and styles, starting with a sequence of 10 airs de cour from the 17th century. Spanning the era from the 1860s to the 1920s are arias and songs by Offenbach, Debussy, Hahn and Messager, and the album then fast-forwards to the 1960s and two iconic French chanteuses, Barbara and Françoise Hardy. Dunford supplies instrumental interludes in the form of two dances by Robert de Visée, a court musician for both Louis XIV and Louis XV, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1 and Gnossienne No 1.

Lutenist Thomas Dunford’s first project for Warner Classics is a complete Handel programme with his Ensemble Jupiter, and his longstanding musical partners Lea Desandre and lestyn Davies. The album stems from Dunford's desire to bring together these two sublime voices and tell a love story through Handel’s most beautiful spiritual music. During the pandemic, Thomas and Lea went through Handel's entire English-language oeuvre to build a narrative Dunford has dubbed ‘a Baroque West Side Story’. The album features arias from Semele, Theodora, Saul, Susanna, Esther, and more.

Handel's Italian cantatas date from early in his career, with few exceptions (none on display here). As a group they are less well-known than his operas, but they're equally virtuosic, and performances of the cantatas whole, as with the three here, are a bit more satisfying than with the operas. The cantatas were composed for parties among powerful Roman cardinals, and they catch the young Handel at the peak of his first success, as Roman audiences hailed him as "il caro Sassone" (the dear Saxon).

Little wonder that the fast-rising mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, being of French-Italian descent, chose to present a sumptuous selection of French and Italian arias from the baroque era, ranging from the Neapolitans Francesco Provenzale and Giuseppe de Bottis or Venice’s fabled Vivaldi, to France’s celebrated Grand Siècle luminaries such as Couperin, Destouches and Philidor, and reaching as far as Germany where Saxon composer Georg Caspar Schürmann and Italian-born Carlo Pallavicino developed their careers – at Saxon courts, indeed, but still in the realm of Italian opera that was then all the rage.

Magic Mozart features French singers, excellent Mozart interpreters: Sandrine Piau, Jodie Devos, Lea Desandre, Loïc Félix, Florian Sempey, Stanislas de Barbeyrac. Clever & popular Mozart program, including hit tracks from Magic Flute, Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Entführhrung aus dem Serail. Special packaging: lenticular cover with flip effect, showing Mozart emerging from behind wafts of misty clouds, depending on which angle you are looking at the cover image from. A sort of ‘enchanted Mozart Cabaret’

"Brace yourself for some exquisitely dizzy spells, at the hand of Jupiter," the booklet notes here confidently proclaim. The simple album title Vivaldi is confident in its own way, and indeed, among all the thousands of Vivaldi releases on the market, this one by the chamber group Jupiter stands out. There are some exceptionally strong soloists, both vocal and instrumental. Sample Peter Whelan in the lovely slow movement of the Bassoon Concerto in G minor, RV 495, and there is mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, who is not to all tastes but strongly to some. Sampling one of her arias will determine which camp you fall into. None of these soloists gets credit on the cover, which mentions only Jupiter and its leader, Thomas Dunford. This is likely because, despite all the solo firepower on display, it is lutenist Dunford who has shaped the style.