Three outstanding early music specialists offer us music that might have been heard on the Grand Tour, an essential formative experience for the English aristocracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Usually consisting of a trip to Italy by way of France or the Netherlands and the various German states, it introduced them to the glories of the Classical past and to the delights of the art and music of their own time. This programme is a selection of the sort of music the tourists would have heard, in Louis XIV’s private apartments at Versailles, in the great Italian court and churches, and back home in London. Composers include Alessandro Piccinini, Giovanni Battista Fontana, Diego Ortiz, Matthew Locke, Henry Purcell, Anne Danican Philidor, Marin Marais, Robert de Visée and Francesco Geminiani.

Pamela Thorby is one of the world’s leading recorder players, equally at home in Renaissance and Baroque music, in modern recorder music, and in jazz and folk music.  The Independent on Sunday described her as ‘a wonderful artist at her very best: relaxed, stylish, unpredictable and distinctive of tone’, while BBC Music Magazine wrote of her recording of Handel’s recorder sonatas: ‘I can’t for the life of me imagine how this glorious recording could be bettered’. Susanne Heinrich’s recordings of solo bass viol music by C.F. Abel, Tobias Hume and J.S. Bach have won her a Diapason d’Or and Editor’s Choice awards from The Gramophone. Early Music praised her ‘outstanding artistry’ while Fanfare thought that ‘for style, tonal beauty and expressive playing, her accomplishment would be hard to beat’. Elizabeth Kenny is equally prominent as a solo lutenist, a continuo player in leading European ensembles, and as the driving force behind performances and recordings with the group Theatre of the Ayre.  BBC Music Magazine thought that her solo recording Flying Horse, of early seventeenth-century English lute music, was ‘a fine balance of scholarship, technology and first-rate performance’.