Featuring Handel's substantial Neun Deutsche Arien (Nine German Arias), HWV 202-210, this engaging late-'80s Bis recording gives the composer's relatively neglected vocal chamber music the royal treatment. It is masterfully produced by the label's founder, Robert von Bahr, and realized with utmost love and expertise by soprano Christina Högman and I Quattro Temperamenti.

On two previous discs, London Baroque has explored the genre of the trio sonatas as it unfolded in 17th Century France and England. Both these issues have met with great acclaim: the English volume being described in Goldberg Magazine as ‘A programme of outstanding music … A gem of a disc’, while the French issue received top marks on German website Klassik Heute, with the following words: ‘Everything that one might possibly wish for in a performance of this music is present here: charm, elegance, eloquence, force, flexibility, fire, intimacy, and the most important: soul.’ The ensemble has now arrived in Germany, or more correctly: the German-speaking world of the time, as the programme also features works from the Low Countries and Austria.

Playlist: The Very Best of Laura Nyro gathers 14 tracks recorded during the singer/songwriter's tenure with Columbia. Included are the original versions of "And When I Die," "Stoney End," and "Flim Flam Man [aka Hands Off the Man]." While this budget-priced compilation should please most casual listeners, it does leave off "Eli's Coming," one of her essential songs.

After his Bach concertos, a classical bestseller in both France and Germany, the young French pianist David Fray brings his unique sensibilities to Schubert. David Fray has already declared his particular affinity with Austro-German music, and after two CDs featuring Bach (and a DVD featuring him in Bach concertos) he now turns to the early Romantic era and Schubert, with a programme of the six Moments musicaux D780, the four Impromptus D899 and the Allegretto in C minor D915, recorded in Berlin.

There are curiously few complete cycles of Beethoven's five sonatas for cello and piano, given that the five, unlike the violin sonatas, were almost equally distributed among the composer's early, middle, and late periods, and that each one was in its way a formally daring work. The last two sonatas in particular, with their mysteriously lyrical third relations and compact finales, fugal in the case of the Cello Sonata No. 5 in D major, Op. 102/2, might be regarded as having inaugurated Beethoven's late period. Cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and pianist Alexander Melnikov (here playing a modern piano unlike on the trio recording the pair made with violinist Isabelle Faust) have an efficient, quick, tough style that beautifully fits these late sonatas.

This Set is the first overview of a life, a dream that is already an oeuvre: the dream of a singer who wanted only to be a voice in the service of the Lord, and who in spite of herself has become a star in the eyes of men and women.
Over the course of the three albums included here, the listener will follow the ascension of an artist in the years when she asserted herself as one of the great interpreters of traditional spirituals and gospel songs. This is a repertoire whose masterpieces date mostly from the 19th century, that period when Liz Mc Comb’s ancestors freed themselves from the chains of slavery through hope and through faith. In the last few years, without distancing herself from her roots, Liz Mc Comb has proven herself to be an enlightened composer, and her fourth album, "Time Is Now", is an indispensible addition to this trilogy.

Although Coltrane only recorded one proper album for Blue Note (Blue Train), he is credited as a sideman on several dates for the venerable jazz label. This disc paints the picture with two numbers from Blue Train (the title track and "Locomotion") and cuts from dates with Paul Chambers ("Just for the Love" from 1956's Whims of Chambers), Johnny Griffin ("Smoke Stack" from 1957's Blowin' Session), and Sonny Clark (the title track from 1957's Sonny's Crib). Rounded out by an early side with McCoy Tyner ("One and Four") and a sample from Coltrane's only meeting with Cecil Taylor (Kenny Dorham's "Shifting Down"), Trane's Blues will no doubt be of interest to fans looking beyond the tenor great's extensive Prestige, Atlantic, and Impulse! catalogs.

Radio Noisz Ensemble, successor of the folk group Emma Myldenberger, came from the Weinheim an der Bergstrasse area and released its only LP, "Yniverze" in 1982. It was compared to works of the Third Ear Band, Between, and Tri Atma. "Odiszée-Parck", appearing only as a small cassette edition, followed in 1983. The music on this album is of a significantly freer style, more unwieldy and harder to digest than its predecessor; less meditative. Once again the oboe is the leading instrument, and also the remaining instrumentation, featuring English horn, zither, double-bass, violin, flutes, etc. is quite unusual.

Wolfram Spyra is a German composer of electronic music. He began his career in the early 1990s constructing 'soundscapes' and installations around Germany. He has collaborated with a wide range of visual artists, musicians, producers and DJs. He has released several albums, starting in 1995 with Homelistening Is Killing Clubs. Spyra's focus is on instrumental electronic music, seamlessly blending interesting samples, synthesizers, percussion and other elements together in unique ways. While sometimes experimental, most of his music has a certain accessibility in terms of the rhythmic and melodic components. Though frequently associated with the retro or "Berlin school" sound pioneered by Klaus Schulze and others, he uses modern ambient electronica elements extensively, creating his own rich sound that defies easy categorization.

This is a sort of self-portrait of the Great Organ of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, delivering all its aspects, enhanced by the choice of a repertoire emblematic of the baroque era: the major classic French organ works (Couperin, Marchand, de Grigny, Corrette) composed to glorify the very specific aesthetics of instruments like that of Louis XIV's Chapel; but also to reveal its other sound riches, transcriptions of chefs d'oeuvres, from Le Sommeil d'Atys by Lully, to the contredanses of Rameau's Boréades. To add a new dimension to the organ's sound universe and to enhance its orchestral qualities, modern editing and "re-recording" processes were gently used to serve the superposition of musical voices, as if invisible hands filled in for the organist in certain works, which are true Proust's "madeleines" for Gaétan Jarry. He goes all out to play the instrument of Versailles "for the Glory of God and the King"!

​In this album Clara Andrada, solo flutist of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, performs three 20th century flute concertos together with the orchestra conducted by Jaime Martín. Malcolm Arnolds delightful Flute Concerto No. 1 makes a pleasant addition alongside Nielsens and Iberts flute concertos. Jaime Martín, himself an excellent flutist, is a perfect companion to these works. This is the orchestras second album for Ondine, and continues the fruitful collaboration between Jaime Martín and Ondine that has already produced three albums previously.

Composed in 1911, Bluebeard’s Castle is Béla Bartók’s only opera – a radical masterpiece which has secured a place alongside the other innovative music dramas of the same period, from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande to Berg’s Wozzeck. Planning to write a one-act opera, Bartók settled on a libretto by Béla Balázs with the kind of surreal and/or macabre themes that would soon feature in his two ballets, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin. The main source for the libretto text was a play by Maeterlinck, a retelling of Perrault’s gruesome tale of Barbe-Bleue, the sinister yet strangely seductive wife-killer.

Following their successful album Overtures from Finland (CHSA 5336), Rumon Gamba and Oulu Sinfonia present another programme of works from their native land. The album takes its title from Selim Palmgren’s four-movement suite, written in 1904, offering richly atmospheric character pieces celebrating the changing seasons. Several of the works here take inspiration from the natural world, not least Kurkikohtaus (Scene with Cranes) which Sibelius composed as incidental music for a play by his brother-in-law, Arvid Järnefelt. Robert Kajanus is often considered the father of Finnish music.