Featured Album February 2026: Bellot Ensemble "Cupid's Ground Bass"

We love taking in the brilliant programmes of live music at Snape Maltings, where one of our showrooms is based. This month one of their artists in residence is Bellot Ensemble, the London-based Baroque group who are also current BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists. Featuring friends of The Early Music Shop including Danny Murphy (whose videos of our lutes and theorbos are available on YouTube) and Matthew Brown (harpsichord), along with our very own Olivia Petryszak making appearances on recorder, their debut album 'Cupid's Ground Bass' was released on First Hand Records late last year. Celebrating musical expressions of love from 17th Century Italy, it's also a fitting Featured Album for Valentine's month.

Cupid's Ground Bass
Bellot Ensemble

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR FEBRUARY 2026

Click here to order now!

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From the artist's press release:

BBC Radio 3 New Generation Baroque Ensemble (2025-27), Bellot Ensemble presents 'Cupid's Ground Bass'. A prevailing feature of music of the 16th century and earlier was a split between the deployment of voices and instruments: occasionally replacing each other, or used in alternation - a more concerted effort in writing dedicated instrumental music with increasing degrees of complexity and virtuosity was taking place. The penchant for writing stories about love in its many forms continued, finding a new home in the developing operatic works as well as the ever popular madrigal genre, as composers continued to find ways to describe the joy, grief, despair and ecstasy of the human experience of love. Cupid's Ground Bass is a celebration of these developing musical aesthetics of early 17th century Italy, focusing particularly on the composers' language of love in all its forms.

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Cupid's Ground Bass":

This CD marks the first recording of the distinctive period-instrument group the Bellot Ensemble, and what a remarkable debut it proves to be. Their star is rising: for two years from 2025, the ensemble is the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Baroque Ensemble, and at the time of writing (February 2026) the group is in residence at Snape Maltings in Suffolk (home of one The Early Music Shop’s two stores) as part of the Britten Pears Young Artists Programme, for which they will be giving two concerts (13 and 20 February) at the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh. Catch them if you can. In the meantime, this new recording offers a snapshot of where they have currently reached and their engagement with this style of music.

Cupid’s Ground Bass presents a varied programme of composers familiar (Monteverdi, Cavalli, Strozzi, Biber) and unfamiliar (Uccellini, Farina, Kapsberger), which celebrates the relationship between voices and instruments – their interchangeability and use in alternation – in music from 17th-century Italy. Exploring love in all its guises, Bellot’s combination of musicological research and a performance manner that lives wholly in the present is irresistibly infectious. They have no definitive versions of these pieces, but rather the musicians thrive on ornamentation, improvisatory divisions and unexpected arrangements of this music. Such spontaneity coupled to fine instrumental playing and limpid singing from the soprano and tenor creates something very special and will win them many friends and admirers. It would be invidious to single out individual contributions, yet we can’t help drawing attention to violinist Maxim Del Mar and recorder-player Olivia Petryszak’s sparring in Uccellini’s Aria sopra La bergamasca, and Edmund Taylor’s beautifully judged account of Biber’s first Mystery Sonata. Monteverdi’s Zefiro torna, as ever, is the 17th century equivalent of a catchy pop number, here delivered with aplomb by Lucine Musaelian and Kieran White, imaginative continuo playing and solo instrumental contributions.

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Cupid's Ground Bass is available from The Early Music Shop online or in-store at our Snape Maltings showroom!

Click here to order now!

At the time of writing, just a handful of tickets remain for Bellot Ensemble's performance at the Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh as part of their residency at Snape Maltings - snap them up quickly by clicking here!

Click here to watch a video of the album's opening track, Amor dormiglione from Barbara Strozzi's Cantate, ariette, e duetti (1651) with Lucine Musaelian (voice, viol), Daniel Murphy (theorbo) and Matthew Brown (harpsichord):