Mead’s eye for detail shows Restoration masterpieces in their true colours.

This month, Tim Mead’s Beauteous Softness does what it says on the can, there’s new music from First Nations composers, and classics from Benjamin Grosvenor and the Brodskys.

A veteran Handelian returns to Rodelinda with a vengeance.

Hot on the heels of Iestyn Davies’ distinguished recording of Bach alto cantatas comes another disc containing two of the same from another British countertenor. Tim Mead, a former choral scholar of King’s College, Cambridge has forged a busy and successful career on the operatic and concert stage. He displays admirable agility in the final aria of Widerstehe doch der Sünde (BWV54). While Davies may have the edge in bringing the words to life, there is certainly much to enjoy in Mead’s account; not only his mellifluous tone but the fine playing of La Nuova Musica, which this year celebrates the tenth anniversary of its founding by artistic director, David Bates. Vergnügte Ruh! Beliebte Seelenlust! (BWV170) also demonstrates Mead’s affinity with Bach’s musical idiom through his unforced vocal technique. His more outwardly expressive approach provides a thoughtful and nuanced contrast to Davies. By way of contrast the Bach cantatas are paired with Pergolesi’s ever-popular Stabat Mater. Mead is joined by soprano, Lucy Crowe who visited Australia in 2012 to be soprano soloist in the ACO’s performances of Beethoven’s Ninth. Although the voices are in the main well matched, there are occasions in this performance where I feel the performers are…

British conductor Jonathan Cohen has a refreshing lack of concern for apparently ‘sacred’, apparently never to be tampered with, performance traditions that can, and do, leave other performances of the B Minor Mass historically boxed-in. Cohen calmly reconnects us with JS Bach’s actual sacred inner-life. Like John Butt’s 2009 reading with the Dunedin Consort on Linn Records, intuition tells you that Cohen’s new B Minor Mass will be viewed kindly by history, the freshness of this conceptually rigorous and unified recording born of an active engagement with the material, rather than requiring the piece to slot conveniently inside an existing point of view. Not that Cohen has anything much in common with Butt. In Arcangelo, period and modern instruments coexist unapologetically, while the Dunedin Consort is an ideologically hardcore period instrument group. Butt unsurprisingly adheres to one-voice-to-a-part whereas Cohen deploys four voices – except in the Confiteor Unum Baptisma where he too reverts to one voice per part, appropriately framing Bach’s subliminal glance back to an older contrapuntal style. But the nuances of Cohen’s perspective run deeper than mere matters of personnel. Butt – alongside other recent interpreters on record: hello Marc Minkowski and Philippe Herreweghe – need you to…