• Ahead of his debut this summer at the Bayreuth festival, the American tenor and Wagnerian Michael Spyres has collaborated with Les Talens Lyriques, Le jeune choeur de Paris and conductor Christophe Rousset to explore Wagner’s early influences. In the Shadows (Erato) travels through Italian bel canto and French grand opera as well as German repertoire (Beethoven, Auber, Bellini, Weber, Marschner and more), all ideal for Spyres’s gleaming, high-octane voice. His exciting singing, with punchy, crisp playing from Les Talens Lyriques, hits you between the ears. These musicians can shift mood too: Suono funerea, from Meyerbeer’s Il crociato in Egitto – a Crusader rarity – is pensive and lyrical. Then we charge back up to sixth gear for the Wolf’s Glen scene in Weber’s Die Freischütz and the high-lying Spectacle affreux from Auber’s La muette de Portici. This satisfying album ends with early Wagner, from Die Feen, Rienzi and his artistic turning point, Lohengrin.
• The British composer Nicola LeFanu (b.1947) is a key figure in musical life, through her teaching (she was professor of music at York University) as well as through her own substantial catalogue of works. The Path Above the Dunes (Métier) – chamber music by LeFanu performed by Gemini – consists of four works written across nearly half a century. The Same Day Dawns (1974) sets short, sensuous texts for soprano (Clara Barbier Serrano), flute/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, percussion, violin and cello. Sextet – a wild garden – fásach (1996), using the same instruments, with piano, conjures wild places in Ireland. The single-movement Piano Trio (2003) moves from fast and furious to diffuse and mysterious. The Moth-Ghost (2020), a dramatic scena on the death of Achilles, draws on her experience as a composer of several operas. Superbly played and sung, this is music to celebrate and explore.
• Lucrezia Vizzana and the rebellious nuns of Bologna: on The Early Music Show, Lucie Skeaping reveals the adventures of a convent full of nun musicians in 17th-century Bologna. Today, Radio 3, 2pm/BBC Sounds.
