For all the late-Romantic extravagances in his Roman Trilogy, Respighi loved plainchant and Renaissance and Baroque music. His Ancient Airs and Dances suites are his most successful efforts to bring early music to his contemporary listeners, in terms of the taste and imagination of his arrangements as well as audience appeal. Surely the most instantly loveable of the three suits is the second.

Respighi's instrumentation for the second suite looks extravagant on paper: piccolo and pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus harp, harpsichord/celesta, and strings. Yet Respighi's settings are remarkable for their delicacy and light step. His sources are sixteenth- and seventeenth century Italian and French lute and guitar pieces he found mainly in turn-of-the-twentieth century transcriptions by Italian musicologist Oscar Chilesotti.

The first movement employs a galliard, saltarello, and canario from Fabritio Caroso's balleto Laura soave, which itself was derived from Cavalieri's music for the 1589 wedding of Ferdinand de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine. The galliard is supposed to be a fairly quick dance, and the saltarello by implication is an even faster dance based on the same tune, but Respighi begins at an easy pace, the oboe singing a delicate, courtly air over a lute-like pizzicato accompaniment. The pace picks up as the fuller orchestra takes on the melody, with the strumming effect even more pronounced. The related and rougher canario helps fill out the movement's middle section, before a mirror-like reminiscence of the first part.

Danza rustica, or country dance, takes off from a treatment by Jean-Baptiste Besard of a simpler Branle de village published by Robert Ballard in 1614. It's a stomping country dance, but the main string melody has considerable breadth and the harpsichord never gets lost in Respighi's full orchestration (the trumpets are muted in imitation of old cornets).

A softly tolling effect begins the third movement, adapted from the anonymous seventeenth century Campanae parisienses, imitating Paris bells. This slow yet not quite religious music wraps around a string-oriented treatment of the exquisite aria Divine Amaryllis, written by Antoine Boësset but associated more with its publisher, Marin Mersenne. The irresistible finale, Bergamasca, started out as a virtuosic piece by Bernardo Gianoncelli, covering the entire range of the archlute and employing tunes from Bergamo, in northern Italy. Respighi passes the bumptious tune through various colorful subgroups of instruments, interrupts it with a hen-like central section, and ends with the orchestra in full cry.

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