In the last of our four podcasts exploring the shortlists in this year's Gramophone Awards, James Jolly and Peter Quantrill discuss the Early, Baroque Instrumental and Vocal, and Contemporary categories.

The Early Music category sees the culmination of The Cardinall’s Musick’s magnificent Byrd series, consort music by John Ward played by the multi-Gramophone Award-winning Phantasm, and music from the Eton Choirbook sung by the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford with great conviction under Stephen Darlington.

In the Baroque Instrumental category, that astounding gamba-player Paolo Pandolfo plays music by Carl Friedrich Abel, a pupil of JS Bach, Richard Egarr continues his survey of the chamber music of Handel and Adrian Chandler and La Serenissima give us French-flavoured Vivaldi.

Baroque Vocal is a very strong category, featuring: a glorious French performance of Bach’s Magnificat; a real choral discovery in Lotti’s Missa a tre cori (coupled with Zelenka and Bach) and music by a composer surely due for wider appreciation, Heinrich Schütz, one of the most important musicians of the Baroque era.

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