The Gabrielli Consort's Praetorious Mass for Christmas Morning is one of the most astonishing things I've ever heard in my life.

Yikes, how did I forget that one? Astonishing is the word, soaring, gorgeous, atmospheric stuff, nearly strong enough to give even this old atheist a religious experience.

Personally I still stick to the David Munrow definition of 'Early Music' as being the period before the baroque, with a rough cut-off point somewhere in the early 17th Century, as the old loud and soft musics gave way to the seductive sounds of the mixed consort and the nascent stirrings of what later became the orchestra.

Anything later than that may well produce extraordinary and revelatory results from the application of Historically Informed Performance right up to Beethoven and Mendelssohn, but that's, for me, a very different kettle of fish.