Tognetti and his world-class band scale the heights.

The Scottish composer Erik Chisholm was nicknamed McBartók because his use of traditional Scottish music was similar to his friend Bartók’s treatment of Hungarian folk music. Both composers found a way to integrate ethnomusical sources into classical structures and an imaginative 20th-century idiom. During the Second World War, Chisholm was stationed in India where he fell under the spell of Hindustani music, particularly traditional Indian ragas, and began incorporating them into his work. He noted a resemblance between Indian music and the Scottish bagpipe music called Pìobaireachd – for example, their use of improvisation over a drone. In 1947, Chisholm accepted a university post in Cape Town, South Africa, where he died in 1965 at the age of 61. While in South Africa he wrote several operas and wrote a book that helped revive interest in the music of Janácˇek. Chisholm’s output is barely known today. In 2012, Hyperion released a marvelous disc of his Piano Concertos No 1, Pìobaireachd (1937) and No 2, Hindustani (1949), neatly encompassing his major musical influences. Both are authoritative, colourful and significant works. On this new release, we get two pieces from his Scottish period. The composer’s orchestration of three of his 24 Preludes…

Proserpine is neither Classical nor a classic. She isn’t the queen of Hades but a 16th-century Italian courtesan who falls in love with the wrong man, tries to kill his fiancée, and stabs herself when he rejects her. Parisian audiences didn’t take her to their hearts. She appeared before them for a mere ten performances in 1887, briefly surfaced 12 years later, and then sank without trace until the Palazzetto Bru Zane, dedicated to the rediscovery of French Romantic opera, brought her back. Bru Zane’s standards are, as usual, impeccable. Ulf Schirmer’s conducting is lucid and elegant, and the recording stars the soprano Véronique Gens in the title role. I recently heard her sing Halévy’s Reine de Chypre in Paris, and was struck, as I am here, by her warm voice and insight into character. Proserpine itself isn’t easy to warm to on first or even second listening, but it’s interesting to hear a French composer grappling with Wagner. The melody lies in the orchestra – the vocal line is largely heightened recit, bar some exquisite ensembles in Act II. Contemporary audiences found the “advanced” composition difficult to grasp, but the orchestration, to a modern ear, sounds more like Gounod…

Groundhog Day is yet more proof (if any were needed) of Tim Minchin's gift as a composer-lyricist.

Secular Suzuki Technique: More sparkling Bach as Masaaki Suzuki's latest journey approaches its conclusion.

Are the heroines of the title the female narrators of these songs and arias, or are they the composers – women including Claudia Sesa, Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini and Lucrezia Vizzana – who surmounted impossible challenges to give voice to their music? They are, of course, both, and it’s a combination that makes for a charged programme. A natural storyteller never afraid to paint period music in rich hues, soprano Ruby Hughes delights in the expressive details of Strozzi’s arioso-like L’Eraclito Amoroso and Lagrime mie. Both are closer to opera than chamber music, the latter opening in a prescient clatter of chromatics. If Hughes takes risks, they only match those of the music. Sesa and Vizzana represent the women confined to convents, for whom music was a rare emotional and expressive outlet. Sesa’s Occhi io vissi di voi has all the erotic spirituality of Teresa of Avila’s writings – a love-song clothed in vestments, and while Vizzana’s O Magnum Mysterium is more restrained, the contrast of the chromatic wounds of the verse to the consonant balm of the Alleluia is a poignant as it is sophisticated. Leavening the vocal music with a thoughtful selection of instrumental works, Jonas Nordberg and Mime…

The young English soprano Sophie Bevan brings plenty of drama and panache – as well as a yearning tenderness – to a delightful programme of concert arias, including the three written for the Czech diva Josefa Dušek, two by Mozart and the other by a young Beethoven. Over a generous 70 minutes Haydn is well represented by Scena di Berenice and his beautiful Petrach sonnet setting, Solo e pensoso. But it’s the four Mozart pieces and Beethoven’s Ah! Perfido, the album’s closer, which show us why Bevan won the 2010 Critics’ Circle award for Exceptional Young Talent. One of the highlights is the lovely duet with The Mozartists’ oboist Rachel Chaplin in the cavatina from Mozart’s Ah, lo previdi. Bevan is a talent to watch. She’s perfectly suited to this material, admirably backed by the period instruments of The Mozartists.  This is the first recording by the offshoot of Ian Page’s acclaimed Classical Opera, with whom Bevan has recorded whole operas as well as appearing with them regularly in concerts. The 34-year-old has also performed at Covent Garden, English and Welsh National Operas and Glyndebourne as well as in Europe. Perfido! was recorded in a church in Kilburn, London. It has…

Ten years ago in Paris Raphaël Pichon founded Pygmalion, a superb ensemble of period specialists, and since then they have steadily built a fine discography; their Bach Masses on the Alpha label have garnered raves as have their Rameau, but this latest release should raise their stock considerably. In order to bring to life the genesis of opera, Pichon has contrived the sort of spectacle that the Medici court was famed for at the end of the 16th century. We all know the story of the Florentine Camerata, though few examples of their experiments are extant, but we do have the intermedi of Peri, Malvezzi, Marenzio and others along with the fragments of operas by Peri, Caccini and Gagliano. Recreating a grand wedding festivity, two mini-operas on the stories of Apollo and Orpheus are bookended by celebrations of love and marriage. From the tenor’s opening cry of Stravaganza D’amore, joined by choirs, sackbuts, cornetti and a lavish continuo with every imaginable plucked instrument, I was hooked and listened through both discs entranced. The soloists are splendid. Sophie Junker produces a gorgeous sound; her O che felice giorno by Caccini, an early highlight. Renato Dolcini raises a smile with Brunelli’s witty…

There’s a good smattering of Weill, but the real finds are poignant political and work songs and a Schoenberg pearl.

Robert Hollingworth has, with customary thought and flair, thrown his little beans (I Fagiolini) into an interesting musical salad to honour Monteverdi’s 450th birthday and his own group’s 30th. His starting point is the only contemporary account of Monteverdi conducting Vespers: a Dutch tourist espied the maestro working away from St Mark’s on June 24, 1620 (the feast of the birth of St John the Baptist). Drawing key elements from Monteverdi’s monumental 1641 collection of liturgical music, Selva Morale e Spirituale (The moral and spiritual wood) Hollingworth fashions a Vespers service for that feast, embellished with vocal and instrumental music of the period. There is much exuberant singing and playing to enjoy in this programme, which eschews the perhaps more famous 1610 collection of Vespers music. (Mind you, 1641 contains the ever-popular Beatus vir with its walking bass.) Hollingworth is happy to give his cornettists, Gawain Glenton and Andrea Inghisciano free rein in the realm of ornamentation. The results are brilliant and impart a splendid sense of occasion. Florid vocal passages are also handled with consummate ease and clarity (Dixit Dominus) while intimate devotional moments, like Donati’s Dulcis amor Iesu! are equally touching. Together with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble and…

South African-born English composer John Joubert turns 90 this year and SOMM Recordings are celebrating. In July, Clive Paget reviewed their recording of the opera Jane Eyre, remarking on Joubert’s stylistic resemblance to Britten. It’s very apparent in this choral music, written between 1952 and 2015. The polytonal harmonies, the word setting, and the choral voicings strongly recall the early Britten of A Boy Was Born and Cantata Academica, although Joubert’s settings are more robust. These traits appear clearly in Three Portraits, a setting of poems by Tudor poet John Skelton. The works are mostly unaccompanied, one exception the charming Autumn Rain (1985). The longest, most interesting work is South of the Line: an anti-war cantata, setting Hardy’s poems about the Boer War. The singers are accompanied by two pianos, percussion and timpani (very Noye’s Fludde), excitingly used. Two movements employ solo vocalists: soprano Chloe Salvidge is impressive in the demanding tessitura of A Wife in London. The Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir used boys in their 2014 Howells recording, but this time the sopranos and altos are female. In fortes (such as Chorus 1 of Incantation, or the Sonnet Op. 123) the women overpower the men, whose tone is fairly…

According to 16th-century clerics, convent polyphony was dangerous, liable to lead nuns into vanity and other wickedness. Listening to the sensuous contrapuntal writhings and twinings, the ecstatic, rapturous beauty of these motets – possibly by Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter Leonora d’Este – you wonder if they didn’t have a point. The motets are from the Musica quinque vocum motteta maternal lingua vocata – the earliest published collection of polyphony composed for nuns. As piece after piece of graceful, equal-voice counterpoint unfolds, what’s striking is how progressive and sophisticated the style is for the 1540s, its smooth consonance spiced with occasional hits of chromaticism, its long lines embellished with little gilded flickers of ornamentation. With voice-parts confined to a two-octave range the risk is of a lack of scope. But thanks to careful deployment of solo and collective forces – the professional singers of Musica Secreta and excellent amateurs of Celestial Sirens – and judicious use of bass viol and organ, there’s enough delicate variation to keep things interesting. Haec dies is rejoicing, kept from all-out ebullience by its dark modality, while the filmy Hodie Simon Petrus, with its imitative upper voices and lace-like detailing, unfolds in rapt arcs. The longest work,…