The French division of the massive EMI corporation has released a compendium called Les Introuvables de Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (EMI 68509, six CDs), and it contains so much outstanding material that one feels churlish complaining about what it lacks. But here we go. These six discs contain more than 125 lieder, ballads, cantatas and songs – primarily in German, but also in French, Italian, Latin and English – recorded mostly in the 1950s and '60s when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's voice was one of the wonders of the musical universe.

Henry Purcell's sonnatas combine slow, vivid, and virtuoso movements, which are always based on pure melodic material. Appealing short melodies are the adagio of the Sonnata No. 13 (Z 798) and the allegro of the Sonnata No. 14 (Z 803). Majestic sounds are heard in the Three Parts upon a Ground (Z 731) and the Chacony (Z 730). Excellent playing by the Purcell Quartet with Risa Browder.

Is an authoritative recording of Henry Purcell's sonatas (in three movements), released on the Chandos label. This volume, available on Discogs, includes early sonatas such as No. 1 in G minor (Z 790), performed with a historically informed approach.

Brotherly Love - The Music of Daniel Purcell, performed by ensemble Sprezzatura with soprano Evelyn Tubb, is a 1999/2000 classical album featuring chamber works and cantatas by Henry Purcell’s younger brother. Released on the Etcetera label, the album showcases intimate baroque compositions, including sonatas and vocal pieces.

King Arthur (1691), like Purcell’s other great scores for the stage, belongs to a highly unusual genre: it is neither a play nor an opera but a hybrid of the two known as ‘semi-opera’. Alfred Deller’s legendary 1978 recording is one of the benchmark interpretations which introduced music-lovers to Purcell’s masterpiece.

Under the expert guidance of Peter Holman, as formidable a scholar of the period as he is experienced executant, these performances by the Parley of Instruments remain as fresh and incisive as on their first appearance over a decade ago. With no special interpretative axe to grind, they remain classic accounts, deserving of a place in anyone’s CD collection, specialist and general listener alike.

After the success of 'The Nascita del Bologna & Violoncello', Bruno Cocset and Les Basses Réunies give us a new version of Purcell s 'Fantazias' [British Library manuscript], with violin consort and a harpsichord consort. All the instruments played on this recording borrow from both families, the viols and the violins, taking the best from each: richness of timbre and development of the harmonics, so that each voice plays an equal part in the narrative while retaining its own identity. Henry Purcell s fifteen Fantazias for the viols, which exist in an autograph manuscript source in the British Library, were not published until 1927.

Founded in 1998 at Pro Corda, Suffolk, the multi-award-winning Doric String Quartet describes recording Brittens quartets as a significant milestone: In our recording we have endeavoured to tread a line that brings out the humanity in these works but also recognises the need for distance and fragility. This is very personal and intimate music, yet also world-encompassing and timeless. The Quartet continues: Another feature of this recording is that Hélène Clément, our violist, is playing on Benjamin Brittens own viola. This instrument (on loan from the Britten-Pears Foundation) was made in 1843 in Milan by Francesco Guissani. It was previously owned by the composer Frank Bridge who gave it to Britten, as a departure gift when Britten and Pears set sail for the USA in 1939. ​

This is a sort of self-portrait of the Great Organ of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, delivering all its aspects, enhanced by the choice of a repertoire emblematic of the baroque era: the major classic French organ works (Couperin, Marchand, de Grigny, Corrette) composed to glorify the very specific aesthetics of instruments like that of Louis XIV's Chapel; but also to reveal its other sound riches, transcriptions of chefs d'oeuvres, from Le Sommeil d'Atys by Lully, to the contredanses of Rameau's Boréades. To add a new dimension to the organ's sound universe and to enhance its orchestral qualities, modern editing and "re-recording" processes were gently used to serve the superposition of musical voices, as if invisible hands filled in for the organist in certain works, which are true Proust's "madeleines" for Gaétan Jarry. He goes all out to play the instrument of Versailles "for the Glory of God and the King"!

Until the late 1680s, Henry Purcell composed almost exclusively for the royal court. But when the monarchy decided to reduce its expenditure on music in 1690, he joined the United Company, a London theatre company, and devoted himself to composing for its productions. These took varied forms, with operas such as King Arthur (1691), The Fairy Queen (1692) and The Indian Queen (1695) but also spoken plays with music, such as The Virtuous Wife (1695). It is excerpts from these works that are presented in Tyrannic Love. Compositions by Purcell’s colleagues or followers John Blow, John Eccles, Jeremiah Clarke and Daniel Purcell complete the programme.

Mields is splendid. Her poise, luminous vocalism and animated dialogue with the band show why she’s an Early Music legend. Her command of the recording’s three languages allows her to relish words as well as music, whether goofing around – as in ‘Bacchus’ HWV228 – or lamenting. Her consistently intelligent musicianship is apparent above all when she improvises according to period and location.

While Herreweghe’s choir employs women for the treble parts, the ensemble is so expertly trained that their sound comes very close to the characteristic English choir of men and boys. Only a small number of instruments and voices is used, and this, in conjunction with a sensitive approach to style, produces performances of superior beauty and taste. Extensive care has been lavished on both clarity and precision of English diction, and outstanding choral intonation makes the clash of Purcell’s cross-relations and his dissonant chromaticism singularly effective. The singing by the soloists is consistently beautiful.

Having been relegated to a moral space of exclusion and fear in the Middle Ages, madness subsequently became a major social phenomenon. Brought under control and personified as 'Folly' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it provided scope for social and moral criticism, leading composers and librettists to give it a prominent place on the operatic stage. Here Stphanie d'Oustrac and the Amarillis ensemble present its multiple facets, from seduction to passionate love, from despair to joy, revealing the underlying truths of humanity in the Baroque era.

Fabio Bonizzoni, one of Baroque music performance leading conductors of our time, and his group La Risonanza make their debut on Challenge Classics with Dido and Aeneas, Purcell's operatic masterpiece. It is coupled with The Love of Mars and Venus by John Eccles and Gottfried Finger, Purcell's near contemporaries. Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, composed in the 1680s, is arguably the most beloved and best-known opera in English. Bonizzoni says: "The charm of this opera is in that it contains everything, like Cervantes' Don Quixote: any life experience is within it. Love, hate, death, dream, despair, the innocent and the wicked play.

It is an important moment in the life of a singer when she is able to confront the standard repertory. After years spent studying theatre and music in Shakespeare’s England under the guidance of musicologist Philip Brett, Jill Feldman recorded two programmes of Henry Purcell’s music in 1992, reissued here as a double CD.