The second part of the 18th century saw increasing popularity for the trio for keyboard and two melody instruments. Joseph Haydn contributed considerably to the development of this genre with his trios for keyboard, violin and cello. Whereas in his early trios the violin has a relatively important part to play – Haydn usually played that part himself - gradually the keyboard became the dominating instrument, reducing the violin and cello to merely accompanying roles.

For more than 25 years, Holzbauer was music director at the court of Mannheim, the musical center of the pre-classical period. His fame is due to his many operas, but he also wrote over 205 works in a variety of genres. However, most of his works have been lost, and the chamber music pieces played vividly by Camerata Cologne in this album serve as good samples of Holzbauer's rich world of works. In particular, the quintets he left behind have significant significance in music history due to their complete harpsichord parts.

This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.

Dass Johann Christian Bach weitaus mehr als nur ein galanter Unterhaltungskomponist war, hat die großangelegte cpo-Edition seiner Werke wohl schon zur Genüge bewiesen. Die Vielfalt und Kunstfertigkeit seiner Mittel wird aber nicht nur an seiner Orchestermusik deutlich, auch die Kammermusik wird - trotz ihrer Anmut und Gefälligkeit - höchsten kompositorischen Ansprüchen gerecht.

Georg Philipp Telemann's chamber oeuvre has always had a significant place in the repertoire of the Camerata Köln. The ensembles contributions to this field have included complete recordings of magnificent cyclical work groups such as his Essercizii musici, Trios of 1718, Six Concerts et Suites, Die kleine Kammermusik, and Der getreue Music-Meister. The present release rounds off the complete recording of Telemanns concertos with wind instruments on a total of 16 CDs on cpo. The Baroque orchestra La Stagione Frankfurt led by Michael Schneider performed the orchestral compositions, and the Camerata Köln was responsible for the chamber works and the wind soloists of the two ensembles are identical. The second release of the Concerti da Camera once again contains chamber masterpieces by Telemann featuring a complex texture of parts in a concerto style in which each of the concertizing instruments is allowed to come forward with thematic material as well as with figurations.

Since it's founding in Freiburg in 1958, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi has been one of the most important and ambitious labels for period performances. Over decades, globally-acclaimed recordings were created with outstanding musicians. The limited edition "Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 100 Great Recordings" contains 100 outstanding DHM recordings with some of the most important and best artists in their field: Nuria Rial, Dorothee Mields, Al Ayre Espanol, Hille Perl, Concentus Musicus Wien, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Freiburger Barockorchester, Skip Sempé, Capriccio Stravagante, La Petite Bande, Gustav Leonhardt, Andrew Lawrence-King, Frieder Bernius, the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Thomas Hengelbrock and many others.

The legendary label, deutsche harmonia mundi, releases a special 50 CD boxset featuring star performers such as Hille Perl, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Dorothee Oberlinger, Simone Kermes, and Nuria Rial and more! This collection displays the sheer variety available from the dhm archive. A perfect collection ranging Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic music.

A beautifully-packaged 50-disc box set, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, one of the most important and adventurous early music labels. The set contains 50 classic recordings of baroque and ancient music, chosen to represent the breadth of this huge and varied catalogue and each disc is slip-cased with artwork replicating the original CD or LP artwork.

The recordings are typical DHM with superb clarity and dynamic range. The mastering to digital is excellent, and the booklet accompanying the series, while brief, is informative. The only unifying these here is baroque Italian composers, but it's extremely easy to fill a collection ten times this size with material from that category. What we end up with in these ten discs is a lovely mix of known and unknown, each pleasant to listen to and discover, and there's no listener fatigue at all working through these discs.