EMA CD Reviews

Rather than simply playing jazz on period instruments or Baroque interpretations of popular music, Les Délices’ new recording, “Songs Without Words,” is an inventive and warm performance of what Duke Ellington astutely called “good music.”

Only four of the nine sonatas for violin and continuo on this recording by the Brook Street Band can be definitively attributed to the master through an extant autograph score. Authorship aside, all of these sonatas are at the very least charming, often clever, and always beautiful.

The ensemble’s new recording explores music composed by or attributed to Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, including scores preserved in the Archdiocesan Museum in the Moravian town of Kroměříž, where the composer worked briefly as a court valet and musician beginning in 1668.

On his latest recording, the remarkable cellist Guy Fishman proves that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach — so admired by the likes of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven — should be viewed as more than the transitional composer he is often thought to be.

The sheer joy that cellist Jaap ter Linden and fortepianist David Breitman describe in the liner notes about getting to play this music with each other is on display throughout the album.