Even by the standards of a time and place—Tudor England—in which masterpieces of choral polyphony appear to have been virtually an everyday occurrence, there is something uniquely and intensely compelling about the surviving works of John Sheppard. This is music designed to be sung by liturgical professionals, and none rise to its demands quite like Westminster Cathedral Choir.

In 16th century France the protestant milieu was intensely oppressed. The grisly culmination of this oppression came on the night of the 23rd/24th August 1572 with the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, during which thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris.

In spite of the immense success he enjoyed in his lifetime, Sigismund Neukomm (born in Salzburg in 1778, died in Paris in 1858 at the age of eighty) is practically forgotten nowadays. Yet he left a catalogue of nearly two thousand works, including fifty masses and a number of oratorios and motets. Neukomm spent twenty years in the service of Prince Talleyrand, who commissioned him to write a requiem mass in memory of Louis XVI, guillotined in Paris on 21 January 1793.

Polychrome. A simple concept that defines the very essence of this recording, in which colour is omnipresent and takes on diverse and nuanced forms. The choice of works in itself forms at once a harmony and a contrast of shades and sonorities: this album offers the virtuosic and lyrical Violin Sonata no.2 in D major op.94a of Sergei Prokofiev, the Sonate posthume of Maurice Ravel, and the Violin Sonata in E flat major op.18 of Richard Strauss, the pièce de résistance of the programme.

The reserve collections of the Bibliothèque Royale of Brussels hold the sole printed copy of Telemann's Twelve Fantaisies for solo flute. . . . These fantasias considerably enrich the slender corpus of Baroque works for flute without bass, alongside two other gems, the Partita of J.S. Bach and the Sonata in A minor of C. P. E. Bach. A cycle for solo flute of this kind, arranged by tonalities (the twelve that come most naturally to the instrument) and rising gradually from the key of A to that of G, is unique in the repertory. . . .

Son of England, the new album from Les Cris de Paris, Le Poème Harmonique and Vincent Dumestre celebrating the work of Henry Purcell and Jeremiah Clarke. Following their acclaimed production of Dido & Aeneas, Vincent Dumestre and Le Poème Harmonique continue their exploration of the world of Purcell and seventeenth-century English music by collaborating with vocal ensemble Les Cris de Paris on a new album Son of England. The album pairs two of Purcell’s most popular works with an exceptional discovery from composer Jeremiah Clarke.