On 2012's Folila (which translates as "music" in Bambara), Mali's famed Amadou & Mariam, the husband-and-wife duo, effortlessly prove that "purist" alarm calls about melding popular and traditional musics across geographies because they dilute authenticity are not only inherently false, but their motivations are suspect. Amadou & Mariam originally cut twin albums -- same songs, tunings, and tempos -- one in New York with Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner, Santigold, Theophilus London, members of TV on the Radio and Antibalas, the Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears, and Bertrand Cantat. The other was a Malian offering, cut in Bamako with master musicians, including Bassekou Kouyaté on ngoni, Zoumana Tereta on sokou, and Toumani Diabaté on kora, to name a few. A possibility presented itself when they took the completed sessions to producer Marc-Antoine Moreau in Paris. He was asked to try to bring the albums together. Moreau enlisted other producer/engineers -- Kennie Takahashi, Renaud Letang, Josh Grant, and Antoine Halet -- to assist. The end result is an organic-sounding masterpiece of cross-cultural collaboration, sung in three languages -- Bambara, French, and English (sometimes in the same song). Production magic aside, this project wouldn't have succeeded were it not for truly amazing songs (written by the duo) and inspired performances by all the musicians. "Dougou Badia" features crunchy guitar interplay between Amadou's instantly recognizable percussive style and Zinner's more rockist attack; it's fuel for a soaring duet between Mariam and Santigold. "Wily Kataso" features Amadou & Mariam with Kyp and Tunde from TV on the Radio on lead vocals; the meld of the two guitarists with Kouyaté's ngoni and the popping rhythm section is infectious. "Metemya" features Shears and Amadou's voices with the latter's knotty, raw guitar and Wurlitzer from Antibalas' Victor Axelrod amid layers of organic percussion. "Nebe Miri" features London rapping and singing in complement to Amadou's lead vocals, all drenched in a soulful meld of harmonies, three guitars, keyboards, and dundun drums. "C'est Pas Facile Pour les Aigles" is a rave-up that combines highlife, power pop, and Bo Diddley, and features Ebony Bones singing with Mariam. On "Sans Toi," Mali's traditional instruments such as sokou and kamale ngoni appear alongside guitar, piano, and the duo's hypnotic vocals. The haunting "Mogo" features bass clarinet, ngoni, djembe, dundun drums, and slide and rockist guitars and chants. "Chérie" is simply presented with Mariam above a Malian children's choir, with Diabaté's kora adding a carefree rural feel to close it. Forget prejudices about "world music"; Folila is great music. Period. © Thom Jurek /TiVo

In 1750, Naples was the eighth-largest city in the world, but its music of the Baroque and early Classical periods remains much less well-known than that of Rome, Venice, or Milan. Pergolesi is a familiar figure, of course, and Alessandro Scarlatti, but many of the composers here -- Emanuele Barbella, Andrea Falconieri, Leonardo Leo, and many more -- will be known mostly to specialists, if even to them. Ophélie Gaillard has managed to put together a double album of Neapolitan works for the cello, a comparatively new instrument at the time. One draw here is her violoncello piccolo, a small, bright, agile five-string cello often used during the Italian Baroque. Best of all, though, is that Gaillard succeeds in living up to the exclamation point in her Napoli! title. She deploys a variety of pieces that capture Naples' musical distinctiveness and imagination. It is not just the tuneful opera arias, although there are several of those, featuring an unusually strong trio of singers in soprano Sandrine Piau, mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti, and countertenor Luan Góes, as well as cello sonatas that borrow an operatic idiom. There is also a wealth of instrumental music, some of it arranged for the cello. Sample the delightful Sonata intitolata Arlecchino, Arlecchinessa, Rosetta, e Pulcinello, where the cello takes on the personalities of figures from the commedia dell'arte. Several pieces here are world premieres, and there isn't a dull one in the whole large bunch. About the only complaint here is Aparte's unidiomatic and boomy church sound, but there is enough interesting music here to make that complaint a minor one.© James Manheim /TiVo

Violinist and Le Concert de la Loge director Julien Chauvin acknowledges the challenges he faces right up front in his note to this Alpha Classics release, writing, "Yes, 'another' recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons!" However, he goes on to argue, correctly, that the four concertos offer "an infinity of imaginative possibilities," and he and his musicians live up to the challenges thus posed to themselves. The first attraction is Chauvin's violin, a Gagliano instrument from Naples loaned by Versailles castle, which the violin is leaving here for the first time in a century. Yehudi Menuhin played it from time to time 50 years ago, but it has rarely been heard. It is a remarkable violin with a gutsy lower register that is ideal for the sense of drama that Chauvin brings to Vivaldi's music. That sense of drama is evident in Chauvin's general interpretations, which are fast and punchy in the Italian manner, and also in specific details that bring out Vivaldi's seasonal program; his readings are fresh and do not avoid tempo flexibility when it seems justified. The phrasing of Vivaldi's instrumental lines is also open to many possible interpretations, and even hardcore Vivaldi lovers will find new approaches here. There is a wonderful countertenor aria as an entr'acte and a muscular reading of Vivaldi's take on the ground bass piece La Folia, RV 63, as an imposing finale. The downside, perhaps, is the one-player-per-part performance; French traveler Charles de Brosses reported an orchestra of 40 girls at Vivaldi's Ospedale della Pietà. The small group reduces the huge contrast between the solo and the tutti group, which is, in some sense, the whole point. Adherent of this approach, however, will find much to enjoy here, and there is a lot even for others. Alpha's sound from Paris' Théâtre sicilien de l'Ambassade d'Italie en France is ideal.© James Manheim /TiVo

Exalted melancholy. A violin and a lute: with this choice line-up, our pair of instrumentalists – and frequent partners on the current Baroque music scene – illuminates some aspects of an elusive amalgam that constitutes the 17th-century English notion of melancholy. The inconsolable ‘Mad Lover’ of the album title is reimagined by Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Thomas Dunford as a character from the reign of Charles II: a tale told through music from the pen of such violin virtuosos as the prodigiously gifted Nicola Matteis. Heightened by the exuberance and abandon common to those musicians transplanted from Italy, the beguiling nuances of this language of yearning and loss continue to echo in the popular music of our time. © harmonia mundi

Anastasia Kobekina suggests the history of the cello through ellipses, jumps in time between pieces from the 18th century, among the very first written for this instrument alone (Boccherini, Fesch, Galliard), and others from our time (Thierry Escaich, Jules Matton) which draw their writing processes and their sound palettes from the ancient repertoire. Whether it is a question of nostalgia, sometimes ironic, of homage or of intellectual and artistic transmission between composers, the compositions for cello are never born ex-nihilo. By returning to the sources of the Baroque era, composers write the present and the future of the cello. Anastasia Kobekina blurs the boundaries by building indescribable bridges between their so diverse writings. © Mirare

In the 1730s, many composers tried their luck in London, where many other treasures were in preparation: Geminiani revolutionized instrumental writing with his famous treatise on interpretation and presented an amazing version of La Folia; his pupil Avison orchestrated concertos by Scarlatti, and Porpora ventured away from opera to rediscover the vocality of the cello with one of the most beautiful concertos of that period. Ophélie Gaillard and Pulcinella treat us to a frenzied and poetic night in London. They meet Vivaldi, Hasse, Scottish composer James Oswald and virtuoso cellist Giovanni Battista Cirri. Guest artists Sandrine Piau and Lucile Richardot take on magnificent vocal pieces by Geminiani and Handel – Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni would have been seriously envious, that’s for sure! © Aparté

Studio recordings of full operas are not so common anymore, but among the few positive side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was that it did spawn several. This one sounds a bit buttoned-up, perhaps because of the restrictions of the time; the album was made in the summer of 2021, and the contributions of the Transylvania State Choir were downloaded from afar (actually, this would be hard to tell by listening), but there is a lot that is distinctive about the performance of this Verdi opera, whose tragicomic quality has made it a special favorite in modern times. Verdi moved the action from Sweden to Boston to circumvent a censorship restriction; nowadays, the Swedish setting is generally preferred, but the curious American colonial setting somehow seems to fit the mixture of elements in the opera, loading political intrigue onto the old comic trope of the masked ball. The biggest news is the presence of tenor Freddie De Tommaso in the lead role of Riccardo. He has been bubbling under the surface of the opera scene, and with this recording, he takes a major step into the spotlight. Consider one of his big numbers, like "Forse la soglia attinse" in Act III, for an idea of why his performance is bringing to mind some of the greats who have recorded this opera. He is ably backed by a strong cast, including the rougher but powerfully dramatic Lester Lynch as Renato, making a compelling contrast with De Tommaso and Saioa Hernández as Amelia. This vocally strong Un ballo in maschera is well worth the attention of Verdi lovers.© James Manheim /TiVo

In the eighteenth century, the sonata model established by the published works of Arcangelo Corelli conquered all of musical Europe. Throughout the century, transcriptions of his music were published for every instrument, and the viola da gamba was no exception. The most interesting collection is that held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (MS Vm7 6308), which presents the twelve sonatas of Corelli’s Op. 5 in transcription for viola da gamba. Although it is preserved in Paris, certain stylistic elements suggest that this transcription originated in the German-speaking region of Europe, with particular reference to composers such as Johannes Schenck, Konrad Höffler or Gottfried Finger, whose works were deeply influenced by Corelli’s style. It is to this repertory that Teodoro Bau, winner of the 2021 Ma Festival Bruges competition, devotes his recording. © Ricercar

If the preceding Dusk at Cubist Castle was the Olivia Tremor Control's very own White Album, then the labyrinthine Black Foliage is their SMiLE -- it's an imploding masterpiece, a work teetering on the cliff's edge between genius and madness. Torn at the seams between pop transcendence and noise radicalism, the group attempts to have it both ways, meaning teenage symphonies to God like "A New Day" rest uneasily alongside musique concrète-styled tape pastiches such as "Combinations" (which, along with the similarly styled, multi-part title track, is one of the many sonic motifs snaking its way throughout the record). There are at least enough ideas for five albums here, which is both Black Foliage's strength and its weakness -- it's impossible not to get lost inside of the OTC's swirling schizophrenia, and too often snatches of brilliance flash by too quickly to savor the moment. Moreover, with songs like "California Demise 3" continuing the oblique narrative running through previous OTC records, the artistic statement the record is making (and there undoubtedly is one) is impenetrable at best. Still, with each of the band's successive releases seeming like just part of a much bigger picture only now beginning to come into focus, maybe that's the point. Ultimately, Black Foliage just might be an end-of-the-millennium appeal that speaks directly and solely to the unconscious. © Jason Ankeny /TiVo

Riccardo Chailly, the esteemed music director of La Scala Theater in Milan since 2015, leads the Theater's Chorus and Orchestra in a recording of choruses from Verdi's operas, which, of course, are practically interwoven into the fabric of the famous theater. This 2023 release is celebratory in several regards: it was issued to mark Chailly's 70th birthday and the 45th anniversary of his debut at La Scala. Verdi's operas provide numerous choruses that are among the most popular and beloved in the genre, including the present "Va, pensiero" ("Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves") from Nabucco, the "Anvil Chorus" from Il Trovatore, and the Triumphal March and Chorus from Aida. Chailly's program covers operas spanning the composer's career and includes several selections that will be less known to general audiences. Among these, and a good example of the full might of the Orchestra and Chorus, is the "Gerusalem!" from I Lombardi alla prima Crociata. Recorded at the La Scala Theater in Dolby Atmos surround sound, the listener is fully immersed and is treated to the theater's legendary acoustics: consider the "Spuntato ecco il di d'esultanza" from Don Carlo, where the hall's resonance is highlighted between the chorus, orchestra, and offstage brass ensemble. This release will be attractive to those with varying degrees of familiarity with Verdi's music and is sure to leave many whistling a tune. © Keith Finke /TiVo

Exalted melancholy. A violin and a lute: with this choice line-up, our pair of instrumentalists – and frequent partners on the current Baroque music scene – illuminates some aspects of an elusive amalgam that constitutes the 17th-century English notion of melancholy. The inconsolable ‘Mad Lover’ of the album title is reimagined by Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Thomas Dunford as a character from the reign of Charles II: a tale told through music from the pen of such violin virtuosos as the prodigiously gifted Nicola Matteis. Heightened by the exuberance and abandon common to those musicians transplanted from Italy, the beguiling nuances of this language of yearning and loss continue to echo in the popular music of our time. © harmonia mundi

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Frescobaldi brilliantly combines improvisation and architecture. These qualities resonate with the discography of harpsichordist Christophe Rousset, whose choice of repertoire and interpretation are adventurous and serious at the same time. Frescobaldi’s counterpoint goes along with the finest art of singing, inherited from the Italian madrigal, and the flexibility of his language highlights the virtuosity of his compositions. Christophe Rousset recorded toccate and partite on a beautiful and original harpsichord of the late 16th century. Its sound faithfully testifies for the significant place of this First Book of harpsichord pieces in the nascent modernity of Frescobaldi. If the modal harmonies are still old-fashioned, the free beat and subtle melodies make it an indisputable baroque master, admired from Italy to France and Germany: Bach is said to have had a copy of his Fiori musicali! This new disc by Christophe Rousset reveals the first treasures composed specifically for the harpsichord. Its repertoire was served from the beginning by musicians whose expressive boldness recalls in a musical way Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. © Aparté