The Early Music Show

Piers Adams celebrates the 300th anniversary of the birth of CPE Bach with tracks from new CDs released to mark the occasion. There are also interviews with musicians in Leipzig, Hamburg and other cities around Bach's native Germany who reveal how they will be celebrating the year. In his time, CPE Bach was one of Europe's most famous and popular composers: a friend of English music scholar Charle...

The multi-instrumentalist Clare Salaman presents a programme all about a once popular early instrument with Swedish origins that has all but dropped off the musical landscape in this country. However, the nyckelharpa (or 'keyed fiddle') makes a sound that delights audiences. Clare has delved into the best and most rare recordings of the instrument to cast some light on the nyckelharpa's beautiful...

Lucie Skeaping plays recordings of the Cardinall's Musick and talks to its director Andrew Carwood as the group celebrates its 25th anniversary. Music played includes works by Byrd, Fayrfax, Ludford and Sheppard. (photo: Dmitri Gutjahr).

Lucie Skeaping takes expert advice from Simon Heighes to explore the background, purpose and music of JS Bach's last great masterpiece - The Art of Fugue. At the end of his life Johann Sebastian Bach set out to create a great summary of his thoughts and ideas about an intellectual musical form he'd made very much his own - the fugue. The result is the "Art of Fugue" which he left unfinished at his...

The birth of Henry Purcell coincided with a hugely turbulent time in English political history, and went almost completely unnoticed. There are no baptismal records and we're not absolutely sure who his parents were, although it's likely that he was born in a house just a few hundred yards from Westminster Abbey, the place were he would eventually make much of his career and reputation. During his...

Lucie Skeaping presents recordings of music by the 13th-century European composer Perotin, including performances by the Hilliard Ensemble, The Orlando Consort and Ensemble Organum. Probably French in origin, Perotin's music embodies the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the ars antiqua style.

Lucie Skeaping presents a concert of music by Bach, Rameau and Leclair given by the European Union Baroque Orchestra and director Lars Ulrik Mortensen at MediaCityUK in Salford. JS Bach: Suite No 2 in B minor, BWV.1067 (flute soloist Anne Freitag) Leclair: Concerto for Flute in C major, Op.7 No.3 (flute soloist Anne Freitag) Rameau: Suite from Acanthe et Céphise.

Lucie Skeaping talks to lutenist Elizabeth Kenny about two of the performers who most inspired her: Robert Spencer and Nigel North. Music is taken from recordings by both performers, including works by composers such as John Dowland and J.S Bach. (Photo: Richard Haughton).

Lucie Skeaping explores the story of the virtuoso German violinist Thomas Baltzar, nicknamed "The Incomparable Lubicer". He caused a storm in 17th-century England and was acclaimed as the greatest violinist in the world.

Early music stalwart, the soprano Dame Emma Kirkby is today's guest presenter of The Early Music Show, and chooses some of her favourite seasonal music from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque. (photo: Bibi Basch).

Another chance to hear Lucie Skeaping in conversation with the late cook Clarissa Dickson-Wright about Handel's love of food. Contemporary pictures and biographers depicted Handel as being over-interested in food, having a "great appetite". From the famous London chop houses, and al fresco picnics along the Thames to new spices and curries, Lucie and Clarissa explore the eating and drinking habits...

In 1609, one of the "most eccentric characters in an age of professed eccentics", one Thomas Ravenscroft edited Pammelia, the earliest English printed collection of rounds and catches. Lucie Skeaping explores the life and music of the man who wanted to produce "Harmony to please, varietie to delight".

Lucie Skeaping celebrates the 40th anniversary of the UK's pioneering period orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music, in the company of Music Director Richard Egarr. Together they look back over the orchestra's history and listen to some of its most important recordings.

As part of Radio 3's Baroque Spring season and in the second of this weekend's Early Music Shows dedicated to French Baroque music, Lucie Skeaping explores the relationship between Jean-Philippe Rameau and his main patron Alexandre Le Riche de la Poupelinière.

Lucie Skeaping's guest is Peter Phillips, director of the Renaissance choral group the Tallis Scholars, which maintains its world wide popularity 40 years after it was founded. Over the years, many of their 60 or so CD recordings have reached iconic status and Peter will be choosing some of the highlights as he talks about the group's history, the important part it played in the early music reviva...

Chorales, or German hymn tunes, played a central role in the sacred music of German composers right from the time of Martin Luther (who wrote some of them himself) up to that of JS Bach. Lucie Skeaping explores some of the ways in which these composers used them, with examples from Praetorius, Pachelbel and Bach, including a complete performance of Bach's Advent cantata Nun komm, der heiden Heilan...

Lucie Skeaping presents a profile of one of the earliest and best-known English operas - Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas", the love story of the Queen of Carthage and her Trojan hero. Set to a libretto by Nahum Tate, Dido and Aeneas was first performed in Chelsea in July 1688, and although it wasn't staged again in the composer's lifetime, it received a brief revival in 1700 and then disappeared comple...

Lucie Skeaping talks to musicologist Ian Gammie about the life and travels of the inimitable Charles Burney. Burney, the 18th-century music-writer, teacher, organist and composer was well known for having opinions on just about everything, and, during his extensive travels through Europe, met some of the great musical luminaries of his day, including Padre Martini, Scarlatti and even the young Moz...

As part of the BBC's Sound of Cinema season, Lucie Skeaping presents a profile of the harpsichord in film scores. #BBCSoundofCinema Lucie looks back on the pioneering work of Wanda Landowska in stimulating a renewed interest in the instrument in the first third of the 20th Century, and how the distinctive sound of the instrument quickly found a use in the cinema. She considers how the harpsichord...

From the early years of the Renaissance, composers portrayed subjects from Greek mythology. These stories provided particular inspiration as the new operatic genre took hold in the early 17th century. The 18th century saw the philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment spread throughout Europe and accompanied by a certain reaction against Greek myth, there was a tendency to insist on the scienti...

Virtually unknown a few decades ago, Georg Philipp Telemann's orchestral suite 'Hamburger Ebb' und Fluth' (Hamburg Ebb and Flow) is fast becoming a rival to Handel's 'Water Music'. Written in 1723 to celebrate the centenary of the Hamburg Admiralty it tackles watery subjects such as the sea deities Thetis, Neptune and Triton, sporting Naiads and even the city's drainage channels! Lucie Skeaping ex...

Catherine Bott looks at the vocal and choral music of Domenico Scarlatti, best known today for his 555 keyboard sonatas. Having grown up in Italy with a rather domineering opera composer as a father, it was inevitable that Scarlatti should have picked up some of his musical influences from the stage, and from the church. By the time Scarlatti settled in Lisbon in the 1720s to work for the Portugue...

As part of the Sound of Cinema season, Catherine Bott looks at the story and the soundtrack of the 1994 film "Farinelli" - a biopic of the great 18th century castrato and his colourful relationships with women, with his older brother and with the composers Handel and Porpora. It's been a long time since we had a real life castrato singer in our midst, and the only recording we have of one is Aless...

Catherine Bott gives us a whistle-stop A-Z tour of how early music has been featured in mainstream films to both poignant and ironic effect; from Allegri and Albinoni to Zadok and Zoolander. #BBCSoundofCinema.

The infamous life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo is full of drama, intrigue and death. Among accusations of a double murder, witchcraft and masochism stands an extraordinary body of music with its own tortured chromatic sound world. To mark the 400th anniversary of the composer's death, Catherine Bott talks with renowned Gesualdo expert Professor Glenn Watkins to explore whether an und...