For fans of Il Giardino Armonico's flamboyant flourishes and exuberant expressiveness, it's like having all your birthdays at once, being presented with this great Warner Classics 11 CD set. My own feeling is that this "free" approach to Baroque music is at its best when applied to the theatrical music of disc 8 or the seventeenth century Italian music on disc 1. The showmanship and playfulness is an absolute joy in many of those pieces. I'm less satisfied with the interpretations of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, (on discs 10 and 11), which require a different approach, I feel. I like my Bach to be a little more measured and subtle, I suppose. It has no need of the Il Giardino Armonico treatment. On the whole, though, I do love this set and wouldn't be without it.

Matthew Locke, England's leading composer in the 17th century, was also one of the busiest, writing for court, theater, and church. Surprisingly little of his music has been recorded, but this excellent recording helps correct this. The music has a strong emotional character, with dramatic, often pictorial harmonic effects that are less favored by today's choirs, but the quality of these works only makes us wonder why Locke is not better known.

This is a superb set of 5 CDs, covering works for viols by four 17the century English composers: John Jenkins, William Lawes (on 2 CDs), Matthew Locke, and Henry Purcell. It is a pure bliss for Baroque, especially chamber music lovers. The works recorded vary: fantasy, suite, pavan, consort, etc., but all are superbly performed by Fretwork Ensemble for 6 viols, sometimes accompanied by organ, spinet, and archlute. The quality of the recording is excellent: a 2001 remastering of previous various recordings done between 1986 and 1996.

Some of the connections with Venice may be a little tenuous, and this particular Winged Lion even circles over Spain clutching a Venetian guitar. The Palladian Ensemble's debut disc was called An Excess of Pleasure; the sequal offers nothing less! From two gutsy Vivaldi concertos via the dashing caprice of Santiago de Murcia's La Jota to a canzon by Cavalli which discharges itself in a haunting echo of Monteverdi's Lamento della Ninfa, the programme continually surprises and enchants. The playing too.

"The Passion of Musick" heißt eine Fantasie des schottischen Soldaten und Komponisten Tobias Hume, die der neuesten CD der Blockflötistin und mehrfachen Echo Klassik-Preisträgerin Dorothee Oberlinger ihren Namen gab. Mit ihrem Ensemble 1700, dem Ausnahmegambisten Vittorio Ghielmi und seinem Gambenquartett »Il Suonar Parlante« gewährt Oberlinger Einblicke in die vielfältige »Private musick«, die in den unruhigen Zeiten im England des 17. Jahrhundert in eleganten Salons, aber auch in Pubs und Gasthäusern erblühte. Auf der Suche nach dem vielfältigen und farbenreichen kammermusikalischen Repertoire dieser Zeit folgen die Musiker dabei auch der Fährte, die die traditionelle, keltisch geprägte Musik im barocken Kunststil Englands, Schottlands und Irlands hinterlassen hat und zeichnen ein vielfältiges Bild der Musizierpraxis der Zeit mit Werken von unter anderem Tobias Hume, Henry Purcell, Nicola Matteis, Orlando Gibbons und Matthew Locke.

The "choice collection" of "music of Purcell's London" is of items such as might have been heard at the concerts of then contemporary music held on the premises of Thomas Britton, the "small coalman", surely one of the most 'unlikely' patrons in the history of music. It is in effect complimentary to the Palladian Ensemble's earlier disc (An Excess of Pleasure, also on Linn records), with another liberal helping of Matteis's various and sometimes agreeably bizarre Ayres and two more of Locke's Broken Consorts, which we find absorbing rather than confusing - as Charles II did…