Early Music

The latest album from the celebrated English early music vocal ensemble Stile Antico, 'In a Strange Land: Elizabethan Composers in Exile,' is a beautiful sequence with works by John Dowland, William Byrd, and their contemporaries – and a decidedly melancholy affair.

In France in the early 18th century, minuets, sarabandes, and gigues were written to be literally danced to, sometimes by popular professional dancers. Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations recall those days with music by Telemann and Jean-Fery Rebel.

The monks retreated behind stone walls to chant their devotions. Composer Lansing McLoskey stands in the agora with his choral music on writings by Wole Soyinka.

In the hands of a gifted group like Vox Luminis, Bach's motets exhibit the great composer's artistic genius as fully as anything else he wrote.

This continuing Rock HOF induction video series comes highly recommended set (3.5 stars out of four), as many musicians perform some rare and very memorable works. Enjoy 44 live performances from four induction ceremonies (2010-2013).

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.