Colour book of more than 200 pages + 8 CD’s in a magnificent box
Languages: French/English/German/Dutch
Following on from and designed along the same lines as the mighty Guide to Period Instruments, this boxed set includes exhaustive introductory texts as well as a huge quantity of music excerpts on the eight CDs. These extracts have been taken from the extensive repertoire recorded by Ricercar over many years, with recordings kindly provided by colleagues from Harmonia Mundi, Gimell, Accent, Alpha, Zigzag and Sony supplementing the programme where necessary. The Lutheran repertoire of the Renaissance has remained for all intents and purposes unrecorded up until now; the tracks illustrating this repertoire together with other excerpts have been recorded specially for this compilation by Vox Luminis. As was the case with the Guide to Period Instruments, each CD can be listened to as an entity in itself, each disc having been organised according to the topics discussed by Jérôme Lejeune in his introduction: the music of the Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican Reformations, the music of the Renaissance in Scandinavia and the Low Countries as well as the music of the Counter-Reformation and its development in Italy, France and Germany during the 17th century. Music from Germany by J.S. Bach and his contemporaries forms a natural conclusion to this collection.
