On their eleventh album for Hyperion, The Gesualdo Six explore a more secular repertoire, drawing on music they have performed live since their formation in 2015. The program spans Renaissance works celebrating nature and love, alongside contemporary settings of texts by Christina Rossetti and Kathleen Jamie. Themes of childhood and innocence run throughout, interwoven with imaginative reworkings of traditional British …

New York City-based period instrument ensemble Sonnambula’s debut album on Avie Records traverses music by several Renaissance composers who were forced to conceal their identities for social, religious, or ethnic reasons. Yet their music transcended the disorder surrounding them, flourishing in the intersection of beliefs and styles. The program features works by William Byrd and Richard Dering, two Catholics composing …

For the ensemble’s tenth commercial album, New York Polyphony has assembled a program of Renaissance compositions by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, ingeniously complemented by 20th and 21st century works composed in the same timeless spirit – often by composers with personal and collaborative ties to New York Polyphony. The album’s evocative title comes from the text of a poem …