Early Music

The music of the Fête Galante-era composers like Jean-Marie Leclair counteracted the grand style of their predecessors, just as Watteau's paintings of regular people enjoying simple pleasures in the outdoors contrasted with the heavy subject matter of the art he'd grown up with.

The contemporary folk music scene and the Early Music scene intersect more than you might think. The Early Music ensemble Tenet proved it decisively with this program, demonstrating such sublime musicianship that I hope they preserve it for future concerts and in a recording studio.

Bach's contrapuntal masterpiece took flight in the hands of one of the world's premiere viol consorts.

The celebrated musician-scholar and eminence grise of the viol offers representative pieces of what can be broadly termed the "Musica Nova" movement of the 16th and 17th centuries in Italy, France, England, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. But you don't need experience with or knowledge of early music to appreciate the beauty, and the consummate expertise, of these performances.

Western Europe's earliest known dream-vision poem, newly translated from the Anglo-Saxon and adapted for the stage.

The a capella singers presented a succinct, enlightening survey of Thomas Tallis's groundbreaking 16th-century music. The concert also offered a reminder of why the composer's best-known works, such as the 'Lamentations,' remain popular after more than four centuries.

Well played all around, this Shakespeare's Globe production is blessed with the preternaturally naturalistic Rylance, whose severely manic-depressive and sometimes delusional King Philippe V of Spain is both brilliantly imagined and pulsatingly real.

This exquisite vocal group puts on energetic, high-spirited concerts that free the ancient music of the Renaissance from the museum and dance it out into the town square.

Two new releases show the continuing vitality of music of centuries past.

One of the world's greatest early music ensembles graced the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square with Christmas-themed music by Palestrina, Taverner, and other great composers of the Renaissance.