It may seem surprising to find an album devoted to dance music from 1300 to 1500 on classical best-seller lists in the spring of 2023. This is a niche slice of the market at best, but after one hears the music of the new ensemble Into the Winds, it will be understandable. Part of the innovation here is just the breadth of repertory represented. Instrumental dances are generally interspersed among vocal pieces, and few performers in performances or on recordings have addressed them as a genre of their own. Into the Winds offers music ranging from simple medieval pieces to transcriptions of vocal polyphony, including a mass by Heinrich Isaac. Beyond this is the crack playing and the intelligent sequencing. All of the players except for percussionist Laurent Sauron trade off among instruments, and there are unusual sonorities at every turn here from such instruments as medieval bassoons with well-thought-out arrangements of several pieces. Many of the composers are anonymous, but others have names and are known, and a recording like this begins to make possible an evaluation of their music. This is a pioneering recording and one that is entertaining for anybody.© James Manheim /TiVo

The latest volume in a series which is rapidly accumulating critical superlatives. Described by International Piano as "one of the most gifted pianists of his generation", Mark Viner is steadily gaining a reputation as one of Britain’s leading concert pianists; his unique blend of individual artistry combined with his bold exploration of the byways of the piano literature garnering international renown. Having set down dazzling accounts of the knuckle-breaking studies and solo Concerto, Mark Viner here shows his ability to distil the spirit of Alkan’s more intimate and spiritual works. Alkan’s piano works are of colossal substance and difficulty, earning him the nickname of “the Berlioz of the piano”. Even today only a handful of pianists can do justice to the fierce demands of his music. But it wouldn’t be fair to let the technical difficulties distract the listener from his truly original, personal style, full of wit, energy and deep feelings. Liszt is reputed to have said that Alkan was the only pianist before whom he felt ill at ease to perform, so daunting was Alkan’s technique. However, Alkan was a serious scholar of Jewish learning and ancient biblical texts, a preoccupation, not a pastime, that took precedence for him over music and the piano. The atmosphere and design of this Op. 72 cycle (completed in 1867) harkens back to the grave passion instilled in the earlier 25 Préludes Op. 31 (1847). Several of the pieces venture beyond evocations of devotion to present psychologically probing dialogues of conflict and reconciliation. From the Revivalist sturdiness of the cycle’s opening number through the inward contemplation of No. 2 to the austere fugue of No. 3 and beyond, Alkan continues to spring surprises on the listener, including sudden harmonic clashes which abruptly break the tonal fabric and anticipate 20th-century trends of modernism. To the Op. 72 cycle, Mark Viner adds a rarely heard Etude which Alkan originally composed for a pianistic encyclopedia compiled by his former professor. He concludes with theEtude "Alla barbaro" which was rediscovered as recently as 1996: it remains utterly arresting, unique and decades ahead of its time. In his authoritative booklet essay, Viner introduces every piece on the album in detail. This is the 5th instalment of the complete recording of the piano works by Charles-Valentin Alkan by Mark Viner. © Piano Classics

The performances on this lovely album of vocal and instrumental music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier make it a recording that should delight the composer's fans and anyone who loves the music of the Baroque. Listeners should be warned that the packaging and even the composer's titles create expectations of music of a very different character from what is actually presented. The three Leçons de Ténèbres of the title, scored for bass and chamber orchestra, refer to baleful texts taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah describing the fall and abasement of Jerusalem, and were written for services on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week, the darkest days in the Christian liturgical calendar. Rather than emphasizing the texts' dire pronouncements of God's wrath, Charpentier's music expresses a gentle compassion for Jerusalem in music that's comfortingly benevolent, full of light rather than darkness. It's a brilliantly counterintuitive but legitimate take on the meaning of the texts. Charpentier was certainly capable expressing profound grief and wrote some of the most wrenching, anguished music of his era, but here he offers a message of hope and reassurance in the darkest season of the Church year. Much of the other music included in the album, all written for liturgical use, is also essentially positive, in major keys and with perky tempos. It complements the tone of the Leçons de Ténèbres, but hardly fulfills the expectations of the album's packaging, which features Caravaggio's dark painting of an emaciated St. Jerome next to a skull. Bass Stephan Macleod is resonant, agile, and warmly expressive in the Leçons and in a very odd unaccompanied motet, Pour plusieurs martyrs, whose music is hardly as somber as its title would imply. Alexis Kossenko, best known as a transverse flute virtuoso, leads the Polish Baroque chamber orchestra Arte dei Suonatori in supple, beautifully nuanced performances. The orchestral sound is sweet and mellow, thanks in part to the prominent use of recorders and transverse flutes and the warm but focused string tone. The sound is clean and present with an expansive cathedral-like ambience, marred only by too-close miking of the winds, which makes gulping intakes of air distractingly prominent.© TiVo

Here's a recording that, to use the terminology of African-American vernacular music, is old school in every way. It begins with a decidedly odd sound, which has a hollow, boxy quality, with distortion at the frequency extremes, that could almost have been heard on a 1950s LP. The booklet indicates that the disc was recorded by Swiss Radio, but it's not clear whether the performance was actually taken from a radio broadcast; even if it was, it's subpar. The list of vintage qualities continues with veteran conductor Michel Corboz and the Ensemble Vocal de Lausanne accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne. Despite the suggestion of modest dimensions in these names, the combined forces are large, maybe not Mormon Tabernacle Choir plus Philadelphia Orchestra large, but bigger than the current fashion for music of the early nineteenth century. And of course the old school hangs on for a good reason: Corboz and his Swiss choristers have a warmth, clarity of articulation, and vigorous response to the text that are hard to find these days. Corboz catches the almost operatic quality of Schubert's final mass, which asks us to believe not in a holy catholic and apostolic church (the composer leaves those words out of the Credo) but that Christ came into the world to the strains of a transcedently beautiful Ländler, sung by a Viennese vocal trio of the streets. Corboz's Schubert deliberately traces outlines of light and shade, lands firmly but not over-heavily on dramatic strokes, and shows the kind of control over large-scale architecture that makes for really good Schubert. The bottom line is that this is a Schubert disc that, though brand new, will feel familiar. Corboz has been doing this kind of performance, and doing it well, for almost 50 years now, and it's still worthwhile even if there are various fresher recordings to choose from. © TiVo

With this third volume of "Airs sérieux et à boire", the ensemble Les Arts Florissants return to this genre whose refinement had marked the French musical landscape for over a hundred years. By turns gallant, earthy, or spiritual, these vocal miniatures, prized at the French court, ushered in a ground-breaking style which opened the door to an endless variety of interpretations. "One can hardly find enough praise for the individuality of these inspired performers, for their skill to make the music animate the words ( . . . ) as they display a joyful unity of purpose. A unique event!" (Opéra Magazine). © harmonia mundi

Nouvelle-France, you will recall, existed from 1534 to 1763, stretching from the north of what is now the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, down to the Mississippi delta in present-day Louisiana, a gigantic territory which bisected North America - to the chagrin of the English lords who were denied access to the vast virgin territories in the west of the continent. War and finally the Treaty of Paris of 1763 saw France cede Canada and all of its territories East of the Mississippi to England, in return for Belle Isle. The English are still laughing! But we digress. Throughout the existence of New France, colonists from Old France brought some musicians over in their baggage trains, and other were born in-country, including Charles-Amador Martin, "ordinary musician with the Jesuits of Quebec". What's more, a number of manuscripts were imported as they were published in France, to assist in the edification (and subjugation) of the indigenous peoples, which gave rise to numerous translations of a number of religious texts in native languages. The current album offers a good selection of 17th Century works (re-releases of a recording made in 1995 and finally available again), sung in the Abenaki language by the Montreal Studio of Ancient Music. The Abenaki language was spoken by the Micmac and Passamaquoddy tribes in what is now Quebec - unfortunately, only a couple of thousand members of these tribes survive in the province... This is a means of doing justice to peoples who were wiped from the face of the earth by religious invasion, and to musicians who, from Paris and quite involuntarily, saw their music used as a weapon. © Qobuz

Several famous pieces of music based on birdsong appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries; those by Saint-Saëns, Britten, and Ravel are here, although Messiaen is not. However, the affinity between music and birdsong had been explored for centuries before that, and the early music group La Rêveuse here provides some delightful examples. The always pictorial François Couperin is represented, as is Rameau, but other composers are less familiar but no less charming. Sample the works by Theodor Schwartzkopff, Michel Blavet, and especially Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667-1737), whose "Les Ramages" ("The Songs") names a group of birds and then illustrates their songs. Then there are historical-instrument versions of Saint-Saëns, Britten, and Ravel. One may accept this idea or not, but even in the latter case, they don't do much to dent the charm of the whole. The program ends with a work by contemporary composer Vincent Bouchot, Le Carnaval des animaux en péril, a kind of a take-off on Saint-Saëns for the Anthropocene era that also calls forth a striking variety of instruments from La Rêveuse. Another questionable idea is that, in keeping with the practices of this group, recorded birdsong is heard between some of the tracks. Whatever aspects of this release might be doubtful, it rarely fails to bring a smile. © James Manheim /TiVo