The Yorkshire Baroque Soloists and Yorkshire Bach Choir were formed in 1973 as the basis of the famous York Early Music Festival, and have built a firm reputation as one of the finest ensembles in the world in their performance and interpretation of 17th and 18th century music. Under their director Peter Seymour they return to disc with a fine selection of soloists to perform Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Their 2009 disc of Bach’s St John Passion, also on Signum, was released to excellent reviews.

This disc is a sampler of Vivaldi discs released by France's Naïve label, and it's highly recommended to listeners who haven't yet given these recordings a try. The group of performers is pan-European, with French singers and Italian instrumentalists especially strongly represented, but a compilation like this brings home how well this label has done at forging a unified artistic vision. Its Vivaldi indeed tends toward "furious," as the title proclaims; it is also garish, energetic, dynamically extreme, and in every way devoted to making Vivaldi out as a rebel in his time.

Scandinavia’s archaeologically known prehistory encompasses around twelve thousand years, culminating in the Viking period (c.800–1050AD). The Middle Ages then followed, around six hundred years later than in continental Europe – a late development due to the long period in which ice still covered Europe’s northern parts. Volume 2 in Delphian Records’ groundbreaking collaboration with the European Music Archaeology Project constructs a soundscape of these two periods, featuring both music improvised on Viking instruments, and notated songs and instrumental items from the early centuries of Christianity in Scandinavia.

This program focuses on the Missa pro defunctis by the composer Charles d'Argentil. Recorded for the first time here, it is one of only a dozen musical settings of the liturgy of the dead written before 1550 to have survived to this day. Little-known today, Charles d'Argentil, who worked in the prestigious Papal Chapel in Rome, was a key figure in the French Renaissance, as well as in the establishment of musical settings of the Requiem for papal ceremonies. His setting sits alongside the three Lamentations du samedi saint by Claudin de Sermisy, composer to the French royal chapel and Jehan Barra's Salve Regina. The Gilles Binchois ensemble here sheds light on an all-too-often overlooked part of musical history, through the generation that directly followed Josquin des Prez. The art of these three composers bears witness to the high level of mastery attained by that productive and talented generation.

Threni (1957-58) is his longest, most ambitious and complex dodecaphonic score, and probably one of its summits. A work like the Requiem Canticles (1966) goes even further in this direction: the composer’s last masterpiece, it seems to summarise in itself the evolution of an entire lifetime, combining elements from the different stylistic periods that punctuated his career – whilst marking a highpoint in the spiritual quest that became increasingly important in Stravinsky’s life. In this major album, Philippe Herreweghe reveals with conviction his love for the composer’s music, and under his sure, inspired direction, the Collegium Vocale Gent and the Royal Flemish Philharmonic reveal their pure poetry.

Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha triumphans is not just a musical military exercise (it is indeed explicitly called "Sacrum militare oratorio") during the Turkish siege of Corfu in 1716. This was 'delicate' for Venice, but also an impressive performance show of the vocal and instrumental possibilities of the Ospedale della Piet.

In 1683, Michel-Richard de Lalande entered the Chapelle Royale as a sous-maître after receiving the support of Louis XIV in a formidable recruitment competition. Still only twenty-five years old, the young composer would swiftly become established as the King s favorite and ascend to the most coveted posts at court in a career spanning almost forty years. Above all, Louis included him in the consultations for the construction of the new Chapelle Royale, adjacent to Versailles Palace.

The members of Cinquecento turn to perhaps the pre-eminent composer of the sixteenth century: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah would have been integral to the liturgical rites of Holy Week: here is one of the most sublime.

Vivaldi, the Venetian: master of the whole palette of human emotions. From the church to the opera house, from tragedy to joy, the immediately recognizable sensibility, the expressiveness, the inimitable colors and an unbeatable talent to say so much in just a few notes. The contralto Delphine Galou (who recently won a Gramophone Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the classical music world) and Ottavio Dantone's Accademia Bizantina have created two recitals of sacred music and of opera that illustrate the incomparable richness of Vivaldi’s body of work and establish the emotional connections between the two repertoires.

Roxanna Panufnik’s ongoing mission to build musical bridges between different faiths was inspired by the birth of her first child in 2002, when she started to reflect on the world she was bringing her baby into. Religious conflict and wars caused by it are constantly in the news – but we rarely hear enough about the affirmative aspects of our many faiths, such as the phenomenal beauty of the varied cultures surrounding them. By exploring these cultures, Panufnik has been able to unearth a bounty of stunning chant and verse and has been brought closer to her own personal spiritual beliefs.

The Singapore Symphony and its music director Hans Graf present a recording of Józef Kozłowski’s Requiem, together with the Singapore Symphony Chorus & Youth Choir, as well as a quartet of outstanding soloists: Olga Peretyatko (soprano), Olesya Petrova (mezzo-soprano), Boris Stepanov (tenor) and Christoph Seidl (bass). The Requiem (1798) was commissioned to Kozłowski by the abdicated King Stanisław of Poland, and can be perceived as a requiem not just for the monarch, but for the entire Polish nation, absorbed by the Russian state during the 1780s.

In the middle of the 16th century, the Geneva Psalter infected the whole of Reformed Europe – Switzerland included – with a true psalm fever. The first complete collection of all 150 psalms, promoted by the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin, was published in 1562. The psalm verses were translated into French and provided with melodies by various Genevan cantors.

In 1779 he was elected maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Milan, where he remained until 1784. Here he exercised his true vocation of composer, in addition to at least twenty of his most successful operas, a vast amount of sacred music for the cathedral, and educating a number of clever pupils, the most distinguished of whom was Cherubini.

Conductor Diego Fasolis and his Coro della Radio Svizzera always can be counted on for a very good show, and this one, featuring two well-known if not necessarily top-drawer Handel works, is no exception. The early Dixit Dominus, with its Vivaldian "De torrente in via" movement and other Italian stylistic elements, is appropriately lively and crisply articulated in the fast sections and fully indulgent of the slow passages, allowing us to hear in gorgeous detail the promising signs of Handel's germinating genius.