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This instrumental ensemble is appreciated for its dynamic vivacity, virtuosic precision, and the historical accuracy of its performance practices. The ensemble has been invited to many of the most important festivals, including the Prague Spring, Flanders Festival, Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht (Ancient Music Festival of Utrecht), Bach Tage Berlin (Berlin Bach Days), Ansbacher Bachwoche (Ansbach Bach Week), the York Early Music Festival, and Wratislavia Cantans. Musica Fiata Köln has collaborated on many performances with the vocal group La Capella Ducale. Its varied and richly textured repertoire includes the brilliant Psalmi Davidici, qui penitentiales nuncupantur (Venice, 1583) and the Magnificat à 12 of 1587 by Andrea Gabrieli; Antonio Bertali's Maria Maddalena; the Vespermusik and other works of Heinrich Schütz; spectacular realizations of works by Giovanni Gabrieli with large instrumental groups (e.g. ten trombones, seven organs, etc.); Vespermusik by Giovanni Valentini and Giovanni Priuli; music in the stilo fantastico from the times of Monteverdi; motets by Jean de Castro; Philippe de Monte's Missa sine Nomine and the masses Vestivi i Colli and Ultimi miei Sospiri; the Missa Susanne un jour by Orland de Lassus; Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine; the Polyhymnia Caduceatrix e Panegyrica collection of evangelical church songs; instrumental works by Michael Praetorius; Johann Rosenmüller's Requiem and Missa et Motetti pro defunctis; Johann Hermann Schein's Psalmen Davids and Te Deum; Johann Schelle's Actus Musicus auf Weyh-Nachten (Christmas Music); Monteverdi's Selva Morale of 1641; Canzoni of Giovanni Picchi; and many other works by these composers and their contemporaries.

Cornetist Roland Wilson has spent most of his career in Germany, where he leads his own extremely durable group, Musica Fiata. He frequently performs, 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. 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. In 2022, he led Musica Fiata and La Capella Ducale in a recording of Heinrich Schütz's reconstructed opera Dafne. By that time, his recording catalog comprised more than 30 items. 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