Les Boréades

This new offering consists of sonatas and concertos for recorder, violins and continuo composed by Alessandro Scarlatti in 1725, the year of his death. Scarlatti’s recorder works are at once intellectual and sensual, and are presumed to have been composed for recorder virtuoso Joachim Quantz on the occasion of his visit to Naples.

Founded by Francis Colpron in 1991, period ensemble Les Boréades de Montréal has made more than a dozen recordings for the ATMA label. The ensemble’s most recent ATMA recording — music by Henry Purcell with soprano Karina Gauvin — was nominated for a 2007 Juno Award.

This specially priced sampler features Montreal’s period ensemble Les Boréades performing music by French, Italian, English, and German Baroque composers."Les Boréades treats us to an orchestral sound of lovely sonority... The many soloists are remarkable... The opening chorus demands a perfection of intonation, articulation, and homogeneity that culminates in the closing phrases."

Following the resounding success of their first two Beatles Baroque albums, Montréal’s Les Boréades are back with their latest in the collection of Beatles tunes on early instruments.

For the majority of music lovers up until the 1820s, the name Bach didn’t conjure up Johann Sebastian, as is the case today, but rather one of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who worked successively in Berlin and in Hamburg. He was indeed one of the most influential composers of his time and his particular qualities made him one of the precursors of musical Romanticism.

Telemann, that most prolific of baroque composers, offers us here some of his most elegant, ingenious and spirited instrumental music. Using of a novel instrumentation that yields unique combinations of tone colour, each of these works aims above all at providing pleasure both to the performers and listener. The baroque quartet Les Boréades has invited several excellent colleagues to share in the pleasure, including the eminent period violinist Manfred Kraemer.