Under the single name, Alfonso, lie two composers, father and son. The strongest bond between them must have been composing; there was precious little else, since Ferrabosco the Elder fled England precipitously in the year his son and namesake was born. As viol players they had some influence on developments in their adoptive land. They are well known to viol players today, and what is presented here, with father and son in alternation, is of far more than academic interest.

Angst der Hellen und Friede der Seelen ("Fear of Hell and Peace of the Soul") is a collection of sixteen settings of Psalm 116 in German, "Das ist mir lieb" (Psalms 116), commissioned by the Jena merchant Burckhard Grossmann in 1616 and eventually published in 1623. The composers are Heinrich Schütz, then in alphabetical order Michael Altenburg, Christoph Demantius, Nicolaus Erich, Andreas Finold, Melchior Franck, Abraham Gensreff, Johannes Groh, Johann Krause, Christian Michael, Daniel Michael, Rogier Michael, Tobias Michael, Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Caspar Trost.

When we turn to live recordings, we enter another world, one in which the performances have, on the whole, a greater consistency of thought and execution. That applies in spades to the famous Bayreuth set of 1966. Karl Böhm's swift, incandescent, very theatrical interpretation isn't to everyone's liking. Yet, for all the fast speeds, the charge of superficiality is misplaced. Böhm's direct, cogently thought through reading, in which tempo relationships, inner figures (as one might expect from a Mozart and Strauss specialist), and instrumental detail are all carefully exposed and related to each other, offers rich rewards. Expressive intensity is here married ideally to a transparency of texture.

For this second recording in duo, Lucile Boulanger and Arnaud de Pasquale propose a journey to 18th-century Germany, in the marvellous setting of the Sans Souci palace where Frederick II of Prussia had established his court. This disc, reflecting the extraordinary conjuncture experienced by the court of Berlin under Frederick II, brings together some of the virtuosic works for viola da gamba and fortepiano by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, Johann Gottlieb Graun or Ludwig Christian Hesse and attesting to the results of fruitful collaborations between the composers at that court.

John Dowland is one of England’s greatest composers. In his lifetime, he was acknowledged as an outstanding lutenist, and his songs have always been popular. Dowland’s distinctive hallmark as a songwriter is his uncanny skill at creating a suitable musical atmosphere for a poem. In 1610, John’s son Robert Dowland (1591-1641), a minor composer of the time, assembled a collection of works by third-party composers entitled A Musicall Banquet and put his own name to it. His father is the most famous of the composers included; there is a suggestion that he helped his 19 year-old son with assembling the collection, hoping that the attribution would launch the young man's musical career. The musical net of the collection is cast wide, with French and Italian composers as well as English. It was the first collection of lute songs to take this approach, presenting a cross-section of European solo songs c.1600.

Clavier Übung means 'a keyboard exercise' or 'practice', which is rather a humble term for such exquisitely-crafted music. Bach borrowed it from Johann Kuhnau, his predecessor as cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, who in 1689 had published a collection called Neue Clavier-Übung consisting of seven suites of dances. Bach's Clavier Übung III was published in 1739, when Leipzig was celebrating the bicentenary of the Lutheran Reformation. The hymns on which the 12 organ chorales on this disc are based focus on the six chief parts of the Lutheran Catechism: the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, Holy Baptism, Confession and Communion.

Born in Danzig in 1626, Balthasar Erben was a cosmopolitan. When he applied for the position of Kapellmeister of the main church of St. Marien in his hometown at the age of 27, the council granted him a generous scholarship so that he could "look around the world and perfect himself as a composer". For five years, Erben traveled throughout Europe, visiting all the centres of musical culture of the time, including Rome. His compositional style, which was developed during this time, is correspondingly distinctive: a combination of different influences, cleverly interwoven. The Abendmusiken Basel offer an impressive collection of instrumental and sacred works by the composer who is unfortunately little known today.

Published in 1733, Pietro Locatelli’s L'Arte del violino for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo took both violin technique and the solo concerto as a genre into a whole new realm. The twelve concertos included in the collection also played a part in forming the image of the violin virtuoso, reaching its full bloom with Paganini towards the end of the century. While the unusually high technical demands of the solo part are obvious to the listener from the start, the great surprise comes at the end of the first and third movements of each of the concertos. Here Locatelli inserts Capriccios for the soloist alone of a difficulty previously unheard of, with a left hand technique making use of extensions, octaves, unprepared tenths, double and triple stopping, arpeggios and double trills.

Heinichen’s Mass employs especially the capabilities of the brass to achieve a festive majesty in sound. A four-voiced trumpet choir in combination with the double choir layout lend Zelenka’s Te Deum a festive character. Hans-Christoph Rademann brings choir, orchestra and soloists to their highest level of performance.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi is arguably one of the best-known baroque composers. However, the rediscovery of the Prete Rosso in modern times took place quite recently. The history of this rediscovery might still offer us some surprises. This recording is aiming to be part of this history, featuring the most recently discovered Vivaldi sonatas for violin and continuo, including the latest discovered works by the Venetian composer (added to the RISM as RV 820 and RV 205/2), as identified by Javier Lupiáñez in 2015, and presenting the first recording of the RV 205/2.

These are Mozart's greatest orchestral works, and they are so rich and full of variety that the "period" instrument approach often makes them sound lackluster and limited in mood. It's especially important to use a fortepiano that combines warmth of tone with clarity. So many of them sound like keyboard xylophones, with a dull low end and little if any sustaining power. Fortunately, Malcom Bilson has selected an attractive-sounding instrument that can hold its own in dialogue with John Eliot Gardiner's very forceful and dynamic accompaniments.

Thirty years on from their acclaimed recording for Erato, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir return to the Bach Motets in a new SDG recording, taken from a concert in London last year at the end of a tour which saw performances in Italy, France, The Netherlands and Germany. The Motets can be seen as some of Bach’s most perfect and hypnotic compositions. Through their extraordinary complexity and density, they require exceptional virtuosity and sensitivity of all the performers. Each of them is endlessly fascinating, and each inhabits its own sound world, Bach's masterful use of canon, fugue and counterpoint, the brilliant exploitation of double-choir sonorities are perfectly matched by the Monteverdi Choir's virtuosity.

Few other composers’ music enjoys such enormous popularity and is as frequently performed on stages worldwide and recorded as that of Antonín Dvořák. And it is the symphonic works that are connected with his name most often. The new Supraphon eight-disc box features several complete sets and encompasses Dvořák’s most significant symphonic pieces. Alongside the Symphonic Poems and Concert Overtures, Supraphon is releasing for the first time on CD Václav Neumann’s sensitively remastered 1972-74 analogue recordings of the complete symphonies (until now, only the digital recordings from the 1980s had been released on CD). Václav Neumann linked up to the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra’s bold Dvořák tradition in the wake of his illustrious predecessors Václav Talich and Karel Ančerl and developed it in sonic colourfulness and romantic sweep.

Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667 – 20 July 1752), also known as John Christopher Pepusch and Dr Pepusch, was a German-born composer who spent most of his working life in England. Pepusch was born in Berlin. At the age of 14, he was appointed to the Prussian court. About 1700, he settled in England where he was one of the founders, in 1726, of The Academy of Vocal Music, which around 1730/1 was renamed The Academy of Ancient Music. In Joseph Doane's Musical directory for the year 1794, the founding of the Academy is discussed; on page 76, Doane states that: In the year 1710 (memorable for Handel’s first appearance among us) a number of the most eminent composers and performers in London [agreed] to concert a plan of an Academy for the study and practice of Vocal and Instrumental Music, which was no sooner announced than it met the countenance and support of the principal persons of rank.

Few ensembles can come to Bach's St John Passion with quite the degree of performance-based insight that Gardiner and his musicians have done. Written for Good Friday in 1724, the passion was the centrepiece of Bach's year-long cycle of liturgical cantatas. Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir spent 2000 performing and recording these surrounding cantatas, before recording this disc in 2003. The result is a little slice of musical heaven. In sound, it's a masterpiece of technical precision and musical beauty. In tone, it perfectly balances the theatrical with the devotional. The English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir expertly build and release tension, their phrases shaped to sound natural, instinctive, and emotionally complete. The work's many dramatic contrasts are also brilliantly done.