Women were not always allowed to compose – often due to restrictions imposed by their families or for social reasons.

An acclaimed virtuoso on the European stage, French pianist Marie Jaëll was also a renowned composer in her own time.

Jack Ladder has been waiting his whole life to make this record.

This year, we conclude our Skymasters trilogy with the release of The Vocal Years. After Remembering The Skymasters and Legacy, we now pay tribute to the singing tradition of this legendary orchestra. The lead role on this album is reserved for Anna Serierse, whose warm voice bridges the gap between past and present. She honors the great vocalists who once performed with The Skymasters, including Greetje Kauffeld, Rita Reys, Rachel Gould, and Marjorie Barnes, and gives their repertoire a fresh, contemporary flair.

Singer, guitarist, and high-voltage showman, Manu Lanvin, has become a driving force in French blues-rock.

Winner of the 2009 ARD International Music Competition, violinist Hyeyoon Park has made a name for herself as a soloist and chamber musician, performing with the likes of Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Kian Soltani, Timothy Ridout and Benjamin Grosvenor. On her first album for Linn, Silenced, she partners Gergely Madaras and WDR Sinfonieorchester in a beautiful programme that showcases two composers who were at odds with the system in place.

A world removed from the grand and awesome visions of the Last Judgement that so often characterize settings of the Mass for the Dead, Brahms conceived a work of ‘consolation for those who are suffering’. Having spent more than ten years absorbing this German ‘humanist’ Requiem, Pichon and Pygmalion have meticulously shaped every bar of this compact work, achieving a form of polyphonic transparency that confounds the senses and transcends the universality of the Requiem's message.

"The Voice of the Beloved" is a forthcoming choral album by the Netherlands Radio Choir (Groot Omroepkoor) featuring 20th-century works by Frank Martin (his Mass for Double Choir), Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur (his Le Cantique des cantiques), and Olivier Messiaen (O sacrum convivium).

Alain Altinoglu and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra have begun to record the complete symphonies of Shostakovich, starting with his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. Shostakovich dared to express human suffering, passion, fear and catastrophe in his music, but always asking the same nagging question: what is man? In this sense, these two symphonies open with a question — an idea of martyrdom that was to become one of the central ideas of his later symphonies and, of course, of his Lady Macbeth of Mzensk. Both symphonies are dated between 1935-1937 when Shostakovich was in his thirties; this was one of the darkest and most difficult phases of his life, marked as it was by the repercussions of some of his writings and the arrest of many people close to him, including members of his family.

Other Lives is an American band formed in Stillwater, Oklahoma, by multi-instrumentalists Jesse Tabish, Jonathon Mooney, and Josh Onstott.

This captivating new release from PENTATONE celebrates the glittering world of 19th-century opera and the timeless beauty of the golden age of bel canto.

For the third volume of their complete Mozart series, Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro bring together the Haffner and Linz symphonies, composed in 1782 and 1783. At this point, Mozart had fully established himself as a composer of opera and dramatic works, and he conceived these symphonies with the mindset of a man of the stage – boldly!

Ain't Got Time To Die began as recorded songs in the WW2 installation on Waiheke Island called Stoney Batter by Nick Abbott onsite in 2023 ( Call My Maker, Apocryphal Flood Blues) ALL other tracks were recorded between then and Dec 2024 at Vanguard Studios Waiheke Island.

On the occasion of her first recording, Sophia Liu has chosen to highlight the romantic music repertoire through performing contrasted pages by Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin, themselves pianists. Along with her virtuosity, the young quick-handed soloist achieves a perfect symbiosis of lyricism and a sense of poetry in addition to an uncommon maturity that already places her among today’s rising stars of the keyboard.

French-Hungarian pianist Suzana Bartal joins Sébastien Rouland and the Saarländische Staatsorchester in this release of two warhorses of the Romantic repertoire, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor. Although not successful at its premiere with the composer at the piano, Saint-Saëns’ 2nd went on to be beloved by the public, and is probably the most played of his 5 concertos for piano. Very few pieces of music are as iconic as the only concerto Grieg ever completed: his famous Piano Concerto in A minor. Liszt famously sight read and lavished praise on it when it was written in 1870, and it has been a perennial favourite since then.