A disc which traces the emotion and joy of Holy Week and Easter by the most famous of all sixteenth-century composers, Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina. His stunningly moving setting of the Stabat mater is set alongside dramatic descriptions of the resurrection and shows Palestrina to be more emotional and daring a composer than is usually thought. Here also you can see Palestrina using a wariety of styles, from conservative sounding polyphony for men’ voices to vibrant new pieces for double choir where rhythm and dialogue are all important.

Leonhard Lechner (ca 1553-1606) was a Catholic South Tyrolean who converted to Protestantism at the age of 18 and is described as an erudite theologian. He is considered the most important mediator of Orlando di Lasso's musical style for Protestant church music. It is not only in his motet passion of 1593 that he shows a special talent for combining the contrapuntal movement of the German tradition with the explicit interpretation of words in the Italian style. Henning Wiegrabe and the Capricornus Ensemble Stuttgart underline this impressively in their colorful performance.

Gabrieli's music, written for a comparatively large ensemble of cornetts, sackbuts (= trombones), dulcian, violins, viola and organ (and in one instance for theorbo), is some of the earliest that can be considered "orchestral", although the use of cornetts and trombones makes it sound, in the main, a bit like music for brass band! The pieces appear to be instrumental developments from earlier vocal compositions (thus the title "Canzone", derived from the word for song) and reflect the situation at St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, where groups of singers or instrumentalists were placed at various points within the church building to create what we might today call a "surround" effect.

David Munrow was a major British music historian who started The Early Music Consort of London with Christopher Hogwood. Monroe also published a number scholarly works on Early Music. One of Munrow's early passions was the study of early musical instruments which he collected until this his death, and are now part of his historical archives. Monroe began a project to make recordings of musical instruments from the Medieval and Renaissance Periods during 1973-74. Munrow was himself was a respected musician in own right on the instruments of the period, and played many of the included examples himself.

There is no shortage of discs around featuring transcriptions of Renaissance music for brass. Whilst played on modern instruments the main difference here however is that London Brass, several of whom play period instruments in other ensembles, have enlisted the specialist knowledge of Philip Pickett to direct them.

Celebrated as one of the finest Tudor composers, Thomas Weelkes served as organist and choirmaster at Winchester College and Chichester Cathedral and although famed for his madrigals, wrote more Anglican services than any other major composer of the time.

Musical Games of the Renaissance: A Century of Musical Ingenuity, 1410-1510,” began as a musical complement to an exhibition of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century hand-painted playing cards mounted at The Met Cloisters in early 2016. On February 21 of that year, Pomerium first presented a public performance at The Cloisters of a program that included all the works recorded here. The performance was in the Fuentideña Chapel, which adjoins the room in which the playing cards were exhibited. The juxtaposition of cards and music made clear that Renaissance society’s fascination with games—well known from fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century images of people playing cards, dice, and chess—also extended to musical composition.

Clarinetist David Orlowsky is widely recognized as a musician of tremendous expressiveness and depth, and is acknowledged worldwide as one of today's leading interpreters of the clarinet repertoire ranging from Mozart to Golijov to klezmer. An exclusive Sony recording artist, David has recorded eight discs which have received three ECHO Klassik awards and won him a large and devoted following. David Orlowsky has appeared both as a soloist and with his trio (the David Orlowsky Trio) at a number of major festivals and venues, including the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Rheingau Music Festival, Lucerne Festival, Gidon Kremer’s Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival, the Philhamonie Berlin, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall, with orchestras such as the Netherland Radio Philhamonic Orchestra and the German Chamber Orchestra.

The Torino Ms J.II.9 codex, kept in the National University Library of Turin, is a sumptuous manuscript consisting of 159 sheets, each measuring 377x270 mm. We may safely assume that the person responsible for putting together the musical works of this codex was a Frenchman resident at the Court of the Lusignan family long enough for the codex to be completed; the period in question must have been sometime between 1413 and 1430 CE.

Giovanni Maria da Crema remains to this day a mysterious figure in the history of the lute, with very little information known about his life. However his oeuvre is crucial to understanding the lute’s place in 16th-century Italy. His Libro primo, published in Venice by Antonio Gardane in 1546, is presented as an edition “newly reprinted and corrected by the author himself”, indicating the existence of a rival prior edition, namely that published by Girolamo Scotto, with the same contents and minimal differences. Two years later, also in Venice, Scotto would publish Francesco da Milano’s Libro settimo which also includes keyboard pieces by Giulio Segni da Modena intabulated for the lute by Giovanni Maria da Crema. Some of these intabulations had already appeared in Giovanni Maria da Crema’s Libro primo without mention of Giulio Segni’s authorship of the keyboard original.

Flemish composer Adrian Willaert – who served as maestro di capella at the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice from 1527 until his death in 1562 – contributed so much to the Italian renaissance; while he wasn't the first to develop the Venetian polychoral style, its propagation in the mid-sixteenth century may well be laid at his feet. Willaert helped introduce the forms of canzona and ricercare, which greatly aided the growth of instrumental music in the years to come. The nearly overarching interest in chromaticism among Italian composers in the late renaissance can be traced to Willaert's door. Nevertheless, toss a dart into a crowd of music scholars and chances are you won't manage to hit one that has much of an opinion about Willaert's work or his music – it is seldom recorded and CDs devoted to Willaert alone are rare. On their own, these aspects make Oehms Classics' Adrian Willaert: Musica Nova – featuring the talents of expert vocal ensemble Singer Pur – special, valuable, and significant for purposes of study and filling a major hole in the renaissance repertoire. But beyond that, it is a fine listening experience as well.

The daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile and the mother of King Charles V, Joan the Mad (Juana la Loca in Spanish) was a Spanish queen who lived from 1479-1555. She is believed to have suffered from mental illness – possibly, she experienced what is now called schizophrenia – and was confined to the historic castle at Tordesillas. A fascinating CD, Music for Joan the Mad was inspired by the life of the Spanish queen, who was believed to be a major music lover. La Nef didn't claim that Music for Joan the Mad was an exact re-creation of Spanish music from the 15th and 16th centuries – the Quebec-based ensemble takes its share of liberties.

This landmark set gathers all seven volumes of Pieter-Jan Belder’s exhaustive exploration of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book in recordings spanning the current decade.