Early Music
Old Wine, New Bottles
Floyd Williams and JANUS illustrate the cross-fertilisation of folk, popular and jazz idioms within classical music. The premise was to play early music of the 14th–16th centuries on modern instruments, free of purist historical constraints.
A Souldiers Resolution: The First Part of Ayres
Countertenor Christopher Field and viol player Miriam Morris present Tobias Hume’s The First Part of Ayres (1605), the first English collection devoted exclusively to the lyra viol and bass viol, ranging from bawdy humour to fashionable melancholy.
Music of the Spanish Renaissance
La Compañia's first CD gathers seventeen Spanish Renaissance works on period instruments with soprano Vivien Hamilton, including cues heard in the film Elizabeth but omitted from its commercial soundtrack.
Songs of Love and Marriage
Benjamin Thorn and Wayne Madden present a journey through 600 years of music on the theme of love. Rarely heard works by Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini sit beside the more familiar music of Telemann and Ortiz.
O Rose So Red
Melbourne-based Schola Cantorum, directed by Gary Ekkel, present chants, songs and motets that honour the Virgin Mary across more than a thousand years of sacred repertoire.
Via Frescobaldi
Seventeenth-century Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi was at once conservative and innovative. La Romanesca presents improvisatory toccatas, imitative polyphonic instrumental works, and songs from his arie musicali of 1630.
Courts in Colour
Traditional melodies from four important courts of the Middle Ages: Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Gaon of Tiberias, Saladin of Egypt, and Alfonso X of Castile and León. Cantigas bring them to life on authentic mediæval instruments.
Travellers' Tapestry
Cantigas weave mediæval and folk-based music from Europe, Asia and the Middle East into a tapestry of trade-route exchange, played on recorder, percussion and early string instruments.
What if a Day or a Month or a Year
Elizabethan lute songs and Ayres sung by Gerald English, a founding member of the Deller Consort, with Jonathan Rubin on lute and Sharyn Wicks on gamba.
Hæc Dies
Easter at Notre Dame, Paris, c.1220. Music for Easter Sunday Mass as it may have been heard at Notre Dame early in the thirteenth century: chant propers, a complete ordinary cycle in two-part Leoninus-style settings, and three-part organum in the style of Perotin.
Silk and Spice
Cantigas follow the mediæval Silk Road in dance, monophonic song and improvisation. Recorders, rebec, vielle, oud, lute and percussion carry music shaped by Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Iberian Triangle
La Romanesca presents a portrait of the musical diversity of Spanish song in the years just before the great expulsion and Columbus's voyages: music of Christian, Moorish and Jewish Spain before 1492.
A Florentine Annunciation - The Music of the 14th Century Vol. 4
The Music of the Fourteenth Century series presents some of the earliest and most significant polyphonic settings of late-medieval lyric poetry. This volume offers music for the Feast of the Annunciation, performed by Les Six.
I am Music - The Music of the 14th Century Vol. 3
The Music of the Fourteenth Century series presents some of the earliest and most significant polyphonic settings of late medieval lyric poetry. Songs by Francesco Landini, performed by the Ensemble of the Fourteenth Century.
Every Delight and Fair Pleasure - The Music of the 14th Century Vol. 2
Northern Italian music from the second decade of the 14th century to the early 15th. Anonymous Rossi manuscript songs sit beside madrigals and ballatas by Maestro Piero and Bartolino da Padova.
Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Music of the 14th Century Vol. 1
Two Gentlemen of Verona gathers secular polyphony from the first known generation of Italian composers. This volume presents madrigals, caccie and a motet by Jacopo da Bologna and Giovanni da Firenze.
The Echo of Opheus
Vihuela music of Renaissance Spain. On vihuela, the ‘Spanish lute’, John Griffiths offers an intimate programme of fantasies, variations, intabulations and dances by the great sixteenth-century Spanish masters, framed by the Orpheus legend.
L'Infidèle
William Bower plays solo lute works by Lauffensteiner, Weiss, Mésangeau and Gallot, much of it first heard on disc when this programme was recorded in 1977.
Monodies
Music from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain and southern France. The programme centres on Martin Codax’s sea-haunted Cantigas de amigo, with songs by the troubadour Marcabru and anonymous fourteenth-century istanpittas.
Love Lyrics and Romances of Renaissance Spain
This is the first recording by the early music group La Romanesca, devoted to Spanish villancicos and romances of the Renaissance.
A Thousand Beautiful and Graceful Inventions
Subtitled ‘The glorious age of medieval and renaissance canons’, this programme of late Middle Ages and Early Modern choral music is sung by the University of Queensland Chamber Singers under Graeme Morton. The illustrated booklet has programme notes by Denis Collins and Jason Stoessel, with complete texts.
Walsingham
Renowned Australian lutenist Rosemary Hodgson’s Walsingham gathers Elizabethan lute variations on a sacred ballad into a contemplative Marian rondo of mysticism and pilgrimage.
Australian Monody
The Marais Project is joined by countertenor Russell Harcourt for a collection of largely Australian songs and instrumental works, spanning light and darkness, love and loss.
Two
Two brings together Marais Project founding members Jennifer Eriksson, viola da gamba, and Tommie Andersson, gallichon, theorbo and baroque guitar. Each plays alternate brackets of solos before they join in a splendid suite by Marin Marais.
The Garden Party
The Marais Project’s anniversary disc The Garden Party has a festive flavour, mixing world-premiere Marais arrangements and Eriksson’s title track with earlier Move recordings across French baroque, Swedish folk and South American song.
Smörgåsbord
The Marais Project’s fifth disc gathers Swedish folk, Bellman songs, Roman and Marais chamber works, a jazz pavane and even ABBA, all heard for the first time in Australia on period instruments.
Lady Sings the Viol
The concept behind Lady Sings the Viol was a CD of “covers”: five singers, alone and together, take songs from 1300 to the present, from Piaf and Schubert to John Paul Jones and Elena Kats-Chernin.
Sit Down Beside Me
In its inimitable style, Pastance again brings together music from the folk traditions and the early music world.
Joy
Joy names the intent behind much of this music: carols of piety, the longing of Landini and Machaut, and Hildegard von Bingen’s soaring beauty. The collection shows how song shaped everyday life in the Middle Ages.
Falling Through Time
All the colour and mystique of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come alive in a presentation rich in music and drama, spanning troubadour song, Machaut, courtly dance and English lute song.
Venice to Versailles
Venice and Versailles stand for the two dominant Baroque styles in Europe: Venice for the robust, joyous exuberance and barocco character of the Italian manner, and Versailles for the refinement, delicacy, elegance and douceur of the French.
Beatus Vir
Recorded live on their 1999 European tour, the Choir of Ormond College under Douglas Lawrence presents small-scale sacred works in up to eight parts by Palestrina, Gesualdo, Handl, Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Stanford and Rheinberger.
two
Recorder player Genevieve Lacey and percussionist Poul Høxbro present a programme spanning medieval dance, Irish folk melody, Baroque virtuosity and contemporary Australian works.
La Prima Stravaganza
Sonatas of 17th-century Italy from Capella Corelli: a window on instrumental music as it found its own voice, from the experimental works of Cima, Castello, Montalbano, Fontana, Frescobaldi, Marini and Uccellini through to Corelli.
The Bedroom of the King (La Chambre du Roi)
Elysium Ensemble bring French chamber music of the early 18th century into the private apartments of Louis XIV: Couperin and Hotteterre in the douceur of Versailles and the Paris salons.
Music from Heaven
The Choir of Ormond College, directed by Douglas Lawrence, in a highly acclaimed programme of unaccompanied sacred works by Allegri, Byrd, Poulenc, Britten, Barber and J.S. Bach.
Music for the Countess of Sandwich
First Australian release of Charles Dieupart’s complete suites for flûte du voix and harpsichord (1701), including two suites later copied by J. S. Bach.
When David heard that Absalom was slain
The Choir of Ormond College specialised in liturgical music of the 16th and 20th centuries. This recording also includes psalm settings, among them Allegri’s Miserere, a setting of the penitential Psalm 51 once reserved for the Sistine Chapel in Holy Week.
Tone-stuffs
The Melbourne Brass Ensemble presents a varied brass-quintet programme of Australian works alongside Renaissance and Baroque arrangements. The playing is dynamic and accurate, with a full sound and a true-to-life concert-hall acoustic.
The Choir of Ormond College Melbourne
Directed by Douglas Lawrence, who led chapel music at Ormond College, Melbourne, for more than twenty years, this recording presents the college choir in English church music of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.
Italian Organ Masters
Major master organist Sergio de Pieri offers an enjoyable and authoritative survey of Italian organ repertoire by lesser-known masters, from Renaissance dances and ricercari to Zipoli and Frescobaldi.
Exquisite Harmonies
Exquisite Harmonies features works for viola da gamba and harpsichord, and several harpsichord solos, largely from the French Baroque. The exceptions are Telemann, Abel and Australian composer Troy Russell. A nice treat is an improvised harpsichord fantasia in the style of Telemann.
Keys to Heaven
The Australian Chamber Choir opens with the first recording of Agata della Pietà’s cantata Ecce nunc, written in eighteenth-century Venice by an orphan of the Ospedale della Pietà and reconstructed by Elizabeth Anderson. Sacred works by Palestrina and Allegri complete the programme.
Duos
An extraordinary acoustic frames extraordinary music: Ruth Wilkinson (recorders and bass viola da gamba) and Cynthia O’Brien (baroque violin), the duo known as Capella Corelli, in late Baroque two-part repertoire.
Soul
Douglas Lawrence OAM leads the Australian Chamber Choir through sacred music spanning Renaissance polyphony, early Baroque splendour and African-American spirituals.
La vida es un pasahe: a life in Sephardic song
Troveresse shapes a life-cycle programme from Sephardic song: cradle and courtship, marriage and mourning, in Ladino traditions that travelled from Spain across Morocco, the Balkans, Greece and the wider Orient.
Love Reconciled
A landmark in Australian early-music performance, The Marais Project’s Love Reconciled is a recording to return to often and savour deeply.
Josquin to Martin
A miscellany spanning High and Late Renaissance motets and nineteenth- and twentieth-century sacred works, drawn from Ensemble Gombert’s first European tour in 2004. The programme was chosen to complement Hommage à Gombert, then in production, with Gombert, Lassus and Monteverdi.
A Valley Fair
Pastance's then most recent offering is a delightful collection of traditional, original and early music for Celtic harp, recorders and voices.