Musica Fiata, La Capella Ducale, Roland Wilson - Praetorius: Polyhymnia Caduceatrix & Panegyrica (1997)

The British cornetist Roland Wilson has spent most of his career in Germany, where he has led his own group, Musica Fiata, and become a fixture, both as soloist and as leader, in the brass-heavy style of early German Baroque music that followed Italian models. Wilson was born in the British city of Leeds in 1956 (some sources say 1951). He studied trumpet at the Royal College of Music in London, switching his specialty to cornett midway through and becoming one of the first group of players academically trained in early music in Britain. Wilson moved on for further study to the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and then moved to Germany. He founded Musica Fiata in 1976 and quickly found recording opportunities with choirs attempting to perform German Baroque music with historically accurate instrumentation: Musica Fiata backed the Kammerchor Stuttgart in recordings of several major works of Heinrich Schütz and, later, of Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine. Finally, in 1992, Wilson founded a choir of his own, La Capella Ducale. Wilson has gone on to record other instrumental and vocal German and Italian works of the early Baroque, both familiar (Giovanni Gabrieli and several albums devoted to Samuel Scheidt) and unknown even to specialists (Antonio Bertali, Kaspar Forster, Johann Philipp Förtsch). Wilson and Musica Fiata have recorded for the CPO, MDG, and, increasingly often, the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi labels. The temporal range of their performances has gradually expanded, and in 2018 Wilson led Musica Fiata and La Capella Ducale in a CPO recording of the Johannes Passion long thought to be by Handel but now attributed to Bach's contemporary Georg Böhm.

Wilson has also been active as an instrument builder and has done substantial research on performance practice and early wind instrument construction, often appearing at scholarly conferences and symposia devoted to these subjects. ~ James Manheim