C.P.E. Bach's music often has a bizarrely experimental quality mixed incongruously but fascinatingly with a conservatism born of his father's influence, and this program of early works, dating from the 1740s and 1750s, offers good examples.

Montserrat Figueras one of the best performers of Claudio Monteverdi’s vocal music. At this time, she developed an innovative style of interpretation, characterised by great fidelity to historical sources, combined with an extraordinary creative and expressive power, that has exerted a decisive influence on the whole historical music movement.
Vocal music before 1800 required a new technical and stylistic approach capable of restoring to the beauty and emotion of the voice, that most human of all forms of expression, the necessary balance between singing and declamation, with an emphasis on the poetic and spiritual dimension of the text.

With a capaciously-filled boxset of a dozen CDs made up of attractive individual programmes and entitled The Spanish Guitar, Glossa reintroduces the superb playing of José Miguel Moreno. And with recordings from 1991-2004 which still sound fresh and vivid today. A new essay and all the sung texts are included in the physical booklet that completes this limited-edition set.

Staier studied piano and harpsichord in the Hochschule für Musik in Hanover and Amsterdam. He studied piano with Kurt Bauer and Erika Haase, and harpsichord with Lajos Rovatkay. From 1983 to 1986 he was the harpsichord soloist for the ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln, touring frequently. At the same time he continued his studies in interpretation of classical and post-classical music on the fortepiano. He resigned from the ensemble in 1986 to embark on his solo career on both harpsichord and fortepiano.

Fifteen years on from his earlier recording of Bach’s three Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord (on Harmonia Mundi, alongside Rinaldo Alessandrini), Paolo Pandolfo is now returning to this repertory with a thoroughly-rethought approach, the fruit of active and concentrated years of consideration, study and research into the inherent possibilities of his instrument. Given the basic differing natures of these two instruments, the performance of these works very often turns – in Pandolfo’s words – into a “musical argument”, rather than what is demanded by the music’s essential nature: a “musical conversation” in which the score achieves “transparency and eloquence”.

A challenge to the virtuoso. While they belong to the German tradition, in these sonatas Bach invented a curious division of the parts in which the viola da gamba lies midway between the bass and the principle voice (the treble) of the harpsichord. This particularity in the writing and their exceptional ingenuity place these works among the great masterpieces in the viola da gamba repertoire, both fascinating and terrifying to performers…

Originally released in 2001 but unavailable for almost two years, Glossa has designed gorgeous new packaging for this most important of Paolo Pandolfo’s projects, possibly a milestone in the recording history of Bach’s music. Everybody seems to know these discs – despite almost no marketing effort, they are perceived with such benchmarks as Glenn Gould’s or Gustav Leonhardt’s renderings of the GoldbergVariations or Anner Bylsma’s performances of the original cello suites.

Grand ballet is an apt title for Paolo Pandolfo’s latest release, reflecting not only Marais’s predilection for dance music but also the fact that he was reported to play the viol ‘with his bow always in the air’. The same might be said of Paolo Pandolfo, whose lithe, balletic style and iridescent sound distinguish him from his peers. He’s supported, too, by a brilliant continuo group, whose daring, stylish realisations contribute to performances which are at once ebullient and intoxicating.

This is a selection of rarely-heard intimate compositions by the incredibly prolific composer, Alessandro Scarlatti. He had great affinity with opera and indeed, wrote dozens of them. His dramatic vein shows itself in many of his smaller-scale vocal works too, particularly the secular (chamber) cantatas (of which genre he wrote no less than 820), duets and in the three intermezzos. In each case, the music conveys the precise meaning of the text, which is partly in dialect. Here, the composer achieves a unique level of expressiveness.