Passion rather than insouciance is Pires’s keynote. Here is no soft, moonlit option but an intensity and drama that scorn all complacent salon or drawing-room expectations. How she relishes Chopin’s central storms, creating a vivid and spectacular yet unhistrionic contrast with all surrounding serenity or ‘embalmed darkness’. The con fuoco of Op. 15 No. 1 erupts in a fine fury and in the first Nocturne, Op. 9 No. 1, Pires’s sharp observance of Chopin’s appassionato marking comes like a prophecy of the coda’s sudden blaze. Such resolution and psychological awareness make you realize that Chopin, like D. H. Lawrence, may well have thought that “there must be a bit of fear, and a bit of horror in your life”. Chopin, Pires informs us in no uncertain terms, was no sentimentalist.

"This Lahti Sibelius cycle is healthy and extremely well recorded. The sense of front to back perspective and of quiet details in the foreground registering despite fff activity above is remarkable and a tribute to Ingo Petry, Robert Suff, Jeffrey Ginn and Jens Braun.
The set is sui generis in that it gives both versions of the Fifth Symphony… It is fascinating to hear the Fifth in its four movement 1915 issue playing 35:16 against the 3 movement 31:20 final version of 1919. After so many years of hearing the Fifth in the tighter 3 movement structure it is impossible to make a reliable snap appraisal. All I can do is to celebrate the chance to hear what amounts to a new Sibelius work… Vänskä knows his way to the elusive realm between gestural defiance and grateful descant." — Rob Barnett

Four chapters across generations: Danish Resonances sets accordion works by Hans Abrahamsen, Niels Rosing-Schow and Per Nørgård against four newly commissioned world premieres by Anders Skibsted, Loïc Destremau, Matias Vestergård and Gustav Bjerre. Accordionist José Valente threads them into a single, unfolding journey that moves by turns lyrical, virtuosic, introspective and expansive, revealing the full expressive range of the classical accordion.

This album brings together transcriptions that open up an unusual chapter in music history: fin-de-siècle lieder, adapted for an unaccompanied choir. Clytus Gottwald thus turns his attention to a repertoire that was virtually non-existent in the late Romantic period. His arrangements open up new possibilities for these lieder without altering their structure or harmony.

Shaped by fragments and moments of improvisation, the Noctunes are the personal take on the tradition of the Nocturnes?. This album contains a series of pieces dedicated to the quiet hours of the night?. Composer and pianist Clemens Christian Poetzsch is recognized for his unique blend of modern classical, jazz, and electronic music. He studied piano at the Hochschule fur Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden, earning his artistic diploma in 2010, followed by composition studies under Thomas Zoller.

The multi-Grammy award-winning Pacifica Quartet continues its highly acclaimed series of recordings exploring the sounds of America with an album of string quartets featuring elements of American folk music and spirituals by Anton Dvorák, Florence Price and Louis Gruenberg, as well as a new work by James Lee III.Pacifica has been praised by The Telegraph as "nothing short of phenomenal" and is known for its "remarkable breadth of expression and beauty of sound" (New York Times). With a career spanning nearly three decades, Pacifica has established itself as the embodiment of the leading American quartet sound.

"Earthly Delights for Angelic Voices" is the promise of the latest recording from the Boston Early Music Festival, and the performers alone suggest that the title was chosen for good reason. Amanda Forsythe, recently honored with a Grammy for her performance in Telemann's Ino, joins fellow singers Dorothee Mields (soprano) and Cecilia Duarte (mezzo-soprano) in bringing back to life a legendary trio that, almost exactly four hundred years ago in the Eternal City of Rome, filled the city's most distinguished connoisseurs with heavenly delight: Le Canterine Romane—Andreana, Leonora, and Caterina Basile, the celebrated "Roman Singers." It was for these three that the crème de la crème of composers—including Luigi Rossi, Domenico Mazzocchi, and Marco Marazzoli—wrote their music, and anyone fortunate enough to hear Mother Basile and her two daughters perform together never forgot the experience. "This concert filled me with such rapture that I forgot my mortal frame and imagined myself among the angels," wrote a French visitor in 1639. One wonders whether he wouldn't have liked to take a recording of the occasion home with him?

As the founder of the Wrocław Baroque Ensemble, which performs on period instruments, the Polish conductor Andrzej Kosendiak is a champion of Baroque music and has specialised in oratorios and cantatas from various periods. Giovanni Antonini has a special connection with this city and this ensemble, as he has been artistic director of Wratislavia Cantans from 2013 to 2024. The flautist and founding conductor of Giardino Armonico was invited by Kosendiak to perform as soloist in Bach’s cantatas featuring the flute: BWV 106, known as Actus Tragicus, BWV 161 Komm, du süße Todesstunde, BWV 182 – Bach’s only cantata for Palm Sunday – and finally the hymn for solo voice with basso continuo, BWV 478 Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh!. ‘In Bach’s cantatas, the flute is never merely ornamental: depending on the moment, it is the “voice of the spirit”, the breath of prayer…’, writes Piotr Maculewicz. The NFM Boys’ Choir joins the soloists and musicians in this invitation to “enter” Bach’s spiritual world!

Insgesamt hat der böhmische Wiener Leopold Koželuch rund fünf Dutzend Sonaten oder Trios für Klavier, Violine und Violoncello veröffentlicht – eine erkleckliche Menge, mit der er einfallsreich und geschickt die aktuellen Modetrends bediente, ohne dabei in jene Leichtfertigkeiten zu verfallen, die selbst in den damaligen Kreisen der gehobenen Hausmusik nach einmaligem Durchspielen beiseitegelegt wurde. Das Trio 1790 hat im Laufe der letzten Jahre rund ein Viertel dieser durchweg entzückenden, teils dramatisch zugespitzten, teils folkloristisch angereicherten Piecen ausgewählt, für cpo mit außergewöhnlich feiner Nuancierungskunst eingespielt und jetzt mit der fünften Folge den Abschluss der kleinen Serie erreicht, der man es anmerkt, dass sie nie als enzyklopädischer Durchmarsch gedacht war: Jede der drei erlesenen »Sonates en trio« ist eine Preziose von eigener Art und als solche ein funkelndes Vergnügen, das wir gewiss nicht nach einmaligem Durchhören beiseitelegen werden.

Antwerp’s collegiate church of Our Lady developed into one of the most important musical centres in the Low Countries over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. This recording traces the lineage of the directors of music and the singers associated with the church, the later cathedral. Their music illustrates how polyphony evolved from its late mediaeval roots into the early Baroque period. Gregorian chants from the Antwerp tradition are included with the polyphonic works as a reminder of the daily services and their music: there was always singing in the chancel, in the chapels and at the services of brotherhoods and guilds that were spread throughout the day.

Victor Julien-Laferrière and Consuelo continue their complete recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies with a triumphant double bill: the ‘Eroica’ Symphony, a grand epic that has left its mark on the history of music, and the whirlwind Seventh, which Richard Wagner would go on to describe as ‘the apotheosis of dance’.

This fabulous five disc set is replete with some of those old Stokowski warhorses all recorded in absolutely mind boggling Phase 4 sound, overblown perhaps but astounding for its time. Decca's remastering is absolutely magnificent and the discs are jam packed with almost six hours of music. This is another fine memorial to a great conductor who remained astonishingly vital until the very end of his life.

Released in 2000 as part of EMI Classics' revered "Les Introuvables" series, this comprehensive 5-CD box set gathers rare, hard-to-find chamber music recordings by violin icon Yehudi Menuhin. Spanning Baroque masterpieces by Purcell, Handel, and Bach (including the famed Double Violin Concerto) to Romantic chamber milestones by Franck, Mozart, Beethoven, Grieg, and Chausson, this collection highlights Menuhin's artistic versatility and expressive depth. Featuring collaborations with his sister, pianist Hephzibah Menuhin, alongside violinists David Oistrakh and George Enescu, cellist Maurice Gendron, and conductor Frank Martin, this set stands as an essential document for violin aficionados and classical archive collectors.

In eighteenth-century Venice, the festivities never cease: Carnival could last for up to eight months of the year. In the Serenissima, everything becomes mask, metamorphosis and illusion. Sottosopra! – “upside down” — conjures up the topsy-turvy world of Baroque Venice: a city where masks erased hierarchies, where Carnival suspended the rules, and where music became at once mirror and vertigo.

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet continues his survey of works by Beethoven's contemporaries with this second volume featuring works by Hummel., Clementi, Berger, and Czerny. The pianist comments: 'The deeper I delve into the universe of composers contemporaneous with Beethoven, the clearer I perceive the nature of his originality and the power of his genius, that which he was able to take from others, or that which inspired them. Would this series, The Beethoven Connection, then, not have any further aims than to magnify the genius of Beethoven? Of course it does! If I may make a geographical analogy, a great mountain never rises isolated in the landscape.