The Early Music Show

Clare Salaman on forgotten instruments which were once part of everyday musical life. Clare considers why instruments which were once part of musical life - such as the vielle, the bray harp, the hurdy gurdy and the viola organista - are now rarely heard. Some were particularly suited to certain styles of music and unable to keep up when fashions changed. Others, while astonishing, intriguing and...

Lucie Skeaping presents the second of two tributes to Frans Bruggen looking at the conducting years, she is joined by flautist Lisa Beznosiuk of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the clarinettist Eric Hoeprich, from Bruggne's own Orchestra of the 18th Century.

In the first of two tribute programmes to the late Frans Bruggen, the recorder player Piers Adams reflects on Bruggen's career as a recorder virtuoso. The programme features recordings by Frans Bruggen performing music by Handel, Vivaldi, De Lavigne, Telemann, Walter, Sammartini, Hotteterre and JS Bach.

Piers Adams celebrates CPE Bach's 300th anniversary year with a visit to the city of Hamburg, where the 54-year-old Emanuel Bach began a new career as music director to the city's churches. Dutch keyboard player Pieter Jan Belder samples the vast collection of fortepianos and clavichords at the Museum of Decorative Arts, and there is a visit to the crypt of the Michaeliskirche where Emanuel Bach i...

Lucie Skeaping is joined by Sir Nicholas Kenyon in a tribute to conductor and musicologist Christopher Hogwood, who died last Wednesday. They consider the extraordinary impact he made in early, baroque and classical music performance, and introduce some of his iconic and groundbreaking recordings. 'Christopher Hogwood was one of the true pioneers of early music performance. It is not an exaggerati...

Lucie Skeaping and conductor Stephen Rice explore the music of the Franco-Flemish composer Pierre de Manchicourt, who died 450 years ago today.

Lucie Skeaping is joined by harpsichordist Martin Perkins to explore the music 18th-century audiences in Birmingham and the Midlands would have known. The programme includes rarely heard works by John Pixell, Richard Mudge, Joseph Harris, Barnabas Gunn, Jeremiah Clark of Worcester and Capel Bond. John Pixell: An Invitation to the Red-Breast Louise Wayman (soprano) Musical and Amicable Society Mart...

Lucie Skeaping explores the origins of Klezmer, a musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, with musicologist Dr Alexander Knapp. Played by professional musicians called 'klezmorim', the genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental display pieces for weddings and other celebrations. Compared with most other European folk music styles, little is known about th...

Lucie Skeaping presents a programme which looks at the development of the Baroque bassoon, from its forerunner - the curtel, dulcian or bajon. With the help of the historian and author Maggie Kilbey and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's Andrew Watts, they chart the spread and popularity of the instrument throughout Europe and the New World, for use in church music and in chamber ensemble...

In the second of our three programmes marking the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean Philippe Rameau, Sophie Yates visits the Royal Academy of Music in London to explore Rameau's mastery of dance music in his works for the theatre. She's joined by the art historian Clare Hornsby, the dancer and choreographer Christopher Tudor and the composer and harpsichordist David Gordon, to examine an engr...

Clare Salaman is fascinated by the continuing debate about authenticity - or Historically Informed Practice (H.I.P) - in Early Music. How can we be sure that performances are historically accurate, and how important is it that they are? Clare talks to Catherine Mackintosh about early developments in performance practice pioneered by David Munrow and his contemporaries, and about Catherine's own wo...

In 1702, the 19-year-old Philip V of Spain came from his native France to Naples for a month. For this occasion, the Neopolitan based composer Alessandro Scarlatti was joined by the other great Italian composer of the day, Arcangelo Corelli, with mixed results! On the 350th anniversary of Scarlatti's birth, Catherine Bott explores the stories that surround the music and entertainments put on for t...

Sophie Yates visits The Russell Collection of Early Keyboard Instruments in Edinburgh to play extracts from Rameau's Pièces de clavecin on three extraordinary double-manual French harpsichords made in the late 1700s and fully restored to playing condition. She talks to the museum's curator, Darryl Martin, about the history of the instruments, and to harpsichord maker Andrew Garlick about how they...

Piers Adams continues to celebrate CPE Bach's 300th anniversary year with a visit to Berlin's Charlottenburg Palace, where Emanuel Bach arrived as an optimistic 26 year old to join the court of Prussia's flute-playing King Frederick the Great. In a guided tour though the palace we hear how Emanuel Bach's adventurous musical style was not to the King's conservative tastes, and so he spent much of t...

Lucie Skeaping celebrates the life and music of English composer Robert Fayrfax who flourished in the early 1500s and was born 550 years ago. More of Fayrfax's music survives than of any other English composer of the period, largely due to the existence of two large Tudor choir books in which his works were collected. Lucie Skeaping takes a look at one of these choir books housed in Lambeth Palace...

Guillaume Dufay was one of the most famous and successful composers of the mid 15th century. Born in Cambrai in what is now northern France, he spent most of his career touring Europe, working in some of the most important and influential centres of his day. He found himself in the middle of many of the major political struggles comfronting the 15th century which inevitably had a profound impact b...

In July 1772 Dr Charles Burney set off on his second European journey to gather information for his proposed mighty publication of A History of Music. Lucie Skeaping interviews musician and publisher Ian Gammie about Burney's musical perambulations through Germany and The Netherlands, and chooses music by some of the composers he met along the way, including Gluck, Hasse and Quantz.

Lucie Skeaping talks to members of the Hilliard Ensemble as they celebrate their 40th anniversary, and plays a selection of their many recordings. The Hilliard Ensemble established a reputation as an early music ensemble with a series of successful recordings in the 1980s, but it was when they began also to focus on new music that the world began to sit up and take notice. The 1988 recording of Ar...

Catherine Bott visits Bath to mark the bicentenary of the death of one of its most famous adopted sons - the celebrated 18th century singer, teacher and composer, Venanzio Rauzzini. Rauzzini was born near Rome, and spent the early part of his career wowing audiences in Venice, Munich and Vienna. When the 16-year old Mozart heard Rauzzini sing for the first time, he was so dazzled by its beauty and...

As part of the BBC's 18th Century Season, Lucie Skeaping looks at the life and music of the German composer Carl Friedrich Abel, who spent most of his career in London. Abel arrived in London in 1754 as a virtuoso viola-da-gamba player, and soon became one of the biggest names on the London music scene. Along with his fellow German musician JC Bach, Abel set up England's first subscription concert...

18th-century life by Hogarth, and considers their musical references. Lucie is joined by Jeremy Barlow, an authority on music in the 18th Century, who has made several recordings with the Broadside Band and has written about music and Hogarth. The three featured pictures by Hogarth are: "The Enraged Musician" The 2nd picture from the series of "The Rakes Progress" "The Beggar's Opera" #BBC18C.

Lucie Skeaping looks at the music from Gluck's fifth operatic masterpiece, Iphigénie en Tauride - based on Euripides' play, and first performed in Paris in 1779. With Iphigénie, Gluck took his operatic reform to its logical conclusion. The recitatives are shorter and accompanied by strings and other instruments (not just traditional continuo). The normal dance movements found in earlier French tra...

Live at Southbank Centre. Lucie Skeaping explores the life and works of Pietro Antonio Locatelli, who died 250 years ago. One of the violin giants of the eighteenth century, Locatelli was born in Bergamo in 1695, but by the age of sixteen had moved to Rome, perhaps to study with the famous but ailing Arcangelo Corelli, but more likely with another prominent virtuoso, Giuseppe Valentini. His growin...

Lucie Skeaping takes a look at some of the composers who lived and worked in Salzburg, before it became the Mozartean shrine we know it as today! The city itself is the fourth largest in modern-day Austria, and sits neatly on the banks of the river Salzach, at the northern boundary of the Alps. The name Salzburg - literally "Salt Castle" - comes from the salt mines in the area that helped start th...

Lucie Skeaping looks at Jean Philippe Rameau's comic masterpiece, the baroque opera Platée. Rameau wrote the opera when he was in his sixties, for an entertainment at a court wedding at Versailles. The story tells of a foolish and ugly nymph who believes she is loved by Jupiter. The sense of the absurd permeates Rameau's score, with the composer and his librettist managing to create a wonderfully...