When Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev visited Hollywood in the late 1930s, his friend and American champion, maestro Leopold Stokowski, was recording The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to be used in Fantasia. Prokofiev was indelibly impressed by Walt Disney’s work. He saw how the Disney artists made their animation efforts adhere closely to pre-recorded music tracks; he experienced the click track, a device developed by Disney to ensure that sight and sound were closely coordinated. He then returned to Russia to work with Sergei Eisenstein on the epic film Alexander Nevsky.

Firma Melodiya presents a recording of two-piano transcriptions by Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns performed by the piano duet of Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle. Representatives of famous artistic dynasties and alumni of different music performing traditions, they began to jointly perform in 2011 and have won the listeners’ hearts in Russia, France and Switzerland.

These are very solid performances from Slatkin, but the recording is the star here. The Elite recordings from Aubort and Nickrenz are simply some of the finest analogue (or any) recordings of orchestras in real acoustic spaces ever made. And Mobile Fidelity, as always, has done them justice, in full. The results are startlingly realistic sounding in timbre, coherence, transparency and staging.

The impact of Russian and Oriental culture on Ravel’s formative years retained a hold on him throughout his life. His colourfully re-orchestrated selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite ‘Antar’ and opera Mlada, with interpolations of his own music, as the incidental score for a theatre production are heard here in their première recording, revived and reconstructed alongside a new text that symbolizes the romance and chivalric spirit of Antar the warrior-poet and his beloved Abla. Ravel’s fascination with the exotic is brought together with Debussy’s influence in the ravishing and enduringly popular song cycle Shéhérazade

"Muti's Beethoven Fifth is fleet, fluid, and transparent. He shows his usual attention to details, and offers many individual touches. I especially enjoyed the horn crescendo in bar 34 of the Allegro con brio. It's not indicated in my ancient Eulenberg score but makes perfect sense in its context. …Muti achieves a clarity and rhythmic definition found only in the finest interpretations…The playing of the Philadelphia Orchestra is nothing short of spectacular. The fast string triplets from measure 132 in the final movement are not only accurate but beautifully played with full tone.

Dumay and Pires have made some outstanding recordings.. and this new set of Beethoven's complete works in the same genre.. belongs among the very best available.
Make no mistake, this is chamber music playing of the first order, and a major contribution to the Beethoven discography–a set to be savored and enjoyed many times over

This two-LP set is the definitive early Cal Tjader album and one of the high points of his career. For a Monterey concert that was considered a preview concert for the 1959 Monterey Jazz Festival, Tjader was teamed up with flutist and altoist Paul Horn, pianist Lonnie Hewitt, bassist Al McKibbon, Willie Bobo (on drums and timbales), and percussionist Mongo Santamaria. Their renditions of Latinized jazz tunes along with a few Latin originals practically define the idiom. Highlights include "Doxy," one of the earliest versions of Santamaria's "Afro Blue" (pre-dating John Coltrane's famous rendition by four years), "Love Me or Leave Me," and "A Night in Tunisia." Essential music for everyone's Latin jazz collection.

Here is another gem from PENTATONE's marvellous series of 'Remastered Classics ' in which classic performances from the 1970s, originally recorded in 4-channel quadraphonic sound, are given a new lease of life on SACD and match, or even sometimes exceed in naturalness, many recordings made today.

This impressive series continues with its incredibly 6-CD sets, this one yielding 100 masterful guitar performances! The heavy emphasis is on classical, from baroque to modern (with two discs devoted to Spanish guitar and another entirely to Rodrigo), but you'll encounter some Beatles along the way, too. Pieces by Bach, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Satie, Britten, Granados, Falla, Rodrigo, Albeniz, Villa-Lobos and others are played by Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, Eliot Fisk, Manuel Barrueco, Christopher Parkening and more!

Agnes Obel's pristine, delicate 2010 debut, Philharmonics, was an unexpected platinum-selling sensation in her home country of Denmark, and a hit throughout Europe. The sudden fame left her reeling, and on Aventine, the classically trained pianist/singer has tried to make sense of things. Accompanied mainly by a single cellist, she has created a quiet, watchful record - a response to having spent 18 months in "a blur" of touring.

Albert Beger's 5's Listening, released in 2004 on the Earsay label and following on from his trio album Hevel Havalim sees Beger in the relative safety and comfort of a quintet. In addition to Beger on tenor and soprano, the double frontline sees him teamed up with Yoni Silver - a long time collaborator of Israeli free jazz legendary pioneer Harold Rubin - on alto and bass clarinet (and organ). The rhythm section comprises guitarist Yiftach Kadan, Bass stalwart Gabriel Meyer and drummer Hagai Fershtman. The latter two are left from the previous trio.

Something new and something borrowed. In the days that Handel lived, it was common to use an existing melody and make it your own. Handel's Grand Concertos contains a surprising quantity of newly composed material, as well as some borrowings, such as the memories or musical anecdotes, written with intense lyricism and certain sentimentality, previously absent from his instrumental music.

In a promotional DVD accompanying this release Jean-Guihen Queyras cites the abundance of excellent Bach Cello Suites cycles on the market as one reason he waited until 2007 to commit his interpretations to disc. Queyras needn't have worried, for his playing is never less than beautiful, eloquent, and thoroughly world-class. It fuses the most apparent characteristics distinguishing certain memorable editions: Schiff's shapely melodic parsing, Pergamenschikov's infectious feeling for the dance, Bylsma's period-performance innovations, and Tortelier's purity of tone.

Martha Argerich’s Ravel G major was for so long a reference recording that it’s easy to forget how idiosyncratic it actually is. I wouldn’t actually blame anyone who found it too garish in its colouring, with its volatility giving diminishing returns and its rubato too predictably appassionato for a sensibility as dapper as Ravel’s. Such a person might well find exactly what they want in Steven Osborne’s account, which is masterful in its own way but essentially self-effacing.

Tippett’s first two published symphonies are mature and confident works dating from the middle of the last century. Coruscating accounts from Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are sure to win new friends for this marvellous music.