It has been a big year for esteemed early music group Salut! Baroque with four concerts each in Sydney and Canberra to mark its 30th anniversary, culminating in a concert celebrating the human voice over three centuries and taking in works from Italy, Germany, England, France and Spain.

Tour guide for the program is soprano Anna Fraser, a regular with Pinchgut Opera, The Song Company, Bach Akademie Australia and other leading Australian companies specialising in old and newer music.

Salut! co-founders Sally Melhuish (recorders) and Tim Blomfield (bass violin) lead a group of 11 instrumentalists for a wide-ranging program which includes pieces by Handel, Bach, Telemann and Rameau among more obscure composers, with an attractive set of 17th-century Spanish songs at its centre.

The concert demonstrates how, with the move away from the church and into courts and palaces as centres of music-making, composition developed from the polyphony of John Dowland – Fraser proving compelling and insistent in his self-questioning Can She Excuse My Wrongs? – to the ornamentation and basso continuo instrumental harmonic richness of Jean-Philippe Rameau and the German Baroque masters.

Anna Fraser and Salut! Baroque: Voice, Rejoice. Photo supplied

Things...