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.

Orjan Hulten presents a brand-new quartet and a new album. Under the name "Peaceful Warrior," the quartet features some of the finest musicians, with the fantastic Isabella Lundgren as a guest. The music can be described as poetic, lyrical, and free. It is newly composed music by Orjan for the quartet. Isabella joins in performing the poem "Please Call Me by My True Names" by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as a reinterpretation of Shirley Horn's beautiful ballad "Where Are You Going?". The "Peaceful Warrior Quartet" may not create world peace, but we can start with ourselves. Peace is about a desire for a better world, but also about a journey inward to us. It's about finding a genuine and generous creative process together in the band and with the audience.

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!

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. Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto was banned for its ‘formalist distortions’ and only premiered in 1955 after Stalin's death. Refusing to join the Nazi-aligned Kultuurkamer, Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans’ work was banned. Her Concert Piece for Violin and Orchestra, composed in grief, is introspective and bitter in tone. A youthful academic exercise, Shostakovich’s Variations Op. 3 brings the album to a rumbustious end.

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.

An exciting listening adventure: The "Ten Preludes" by Sofia Gubaidulina from 1974 merge with the Allemandes from Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites into a fascinating dialogue between past and present.