Stravinsky’s Perséphone (1934) is a dynamic musical-theatrical narration of the myth of Persephone’s abduction to the underworld and return to earth. The transparent, sober but evocative music epitomizes Stravinsky’s sensuous take on Neoclassicism, and the piece showcases Stravinsky’s eclectic, original and highly personal approach to music and musical drama through a playful mixture of several genres – melodrama, song, chorus, dance and pantomime. Ultimately, Perséphone offers Stravinsky’s second ode to spring, albeit without the brutal excesses of Le Sacre.

First world premiere on disc for these three Symphonies from Anton Zimmermann (1741-1781), a contemporary composer of Haydn, who unfortunately passed away at 39—because when listening to those gems, we wonder where he would have stopped had he lived up until, let’s say, 1810 for example… We notice straightaway that Zimmermann thumbs his nose at every standard: in the use of keys (in 1771, a symphony in E-minor was kind of a rarity: Haydn himself, a great experimenter, has only one under his belt), in the architecture—the order and type of movements are somewhat knocked over—and in the instrumentality too.

Circles Around The Sun explore new horizons on the band’s upcoming double album, LET IT WANDER. It’s the first new music from the quartet since their acclaimed 2015 debut, Interludes For The Dead.

The Antwerp based French printer Christophe Plantin (1520-1589) achieved international renown through his epic bible editions (e.g. the eight part “Biblia Regia”) and elaborate humanistic works by the likes of Justus Lipsius and the mathematician Simon Stevin. On the other hand, his fame as a publisher of ground-breaking music prints of esteemed sixteenth century composers, often presented as monumental choir books, seems today to have gone relatively unnoticed.

Bruno Helstroffer writes of his new release: Its a logbook, the one Ive never really kept. My years of blues/rock and early music mingle here; the thousands of kilometers travelled with that theorbo of mine, the cities and the countryside, the railways, the skies, the scents, the lights; but above all, the music of the people. Partite variate sopra questaria francese detta lalemana is a tablature by Piccinini of an aria also called La Monica.

Discover poetry in motion with Beauty Come Dancing, composer Gordon Getty’s new album of choral works. Love and dance permeate this collection of new music, paying homage to the romantic and elegant traditions abounding in the latter half of the 19th century. Here, Getty finds inspiration in the poetry of John Keats, Lord Byron, John Masefield, Sara Teasdale, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Ernest Christopher Dowson. These settings sit alongside choral treatments of three of Getty’s original poems, plus his arrangement of traditional favorite “Shenandoah.”