Here's a conundrum: Leonidas Kavakos and Peter Nagy have selected two works each by J.S. Bach and Igor Stravinsky, for what seems a didactic demonstration of both composers' affinity for an objective "musical science"; yet the violinist and pianist deliver these works with so much feeling that their results seem quite subjective, and thereby undermine the presentation.

This record pairs two composers linked by personal and stylistic association with two performers ideally suited to their music technically and temperamentally. Both composer were attracted to gypsy music, as is shown in the works included here: one early and one late work each.

The pure voices of Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth, and Torunn Østrem Ossum combine to make Trio Mediaeval a sensation among early music fans. Yet Soir, dit-elle is largely an album of contemporary works written especially for this group by such active composers as Gavin Bryars, Ivan Moody, Andrew Smith, and Oleh Harkavyy. With the exception of the late medieval Missa Alma redemptoris mater by Leonel Power and the twelfth century chant on which it is based, the works are modern imitations in the medieval ecclesiastical style.

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli's music ranges from brash to deeply personal. His scores explore dynamic and rhythmic extremes, and almost seem to be a soundtrack for angular, rhapsodic dreams. At times the orchestra swells to a heavy Russian march complete with bells and drums, and at other times there is near silence. The two works presented on this CD are enigmatic, yet one can sense that the materials are steeped in history, memory and drama.

ECM made history in 1984 with the release of Tabula rasa, the first of the jazz label’s equally influential New Series. Not only did this beloved recording introduce many to the music of Arvo Pärt, but it also clarified producer Manfred Eicher’s classical roots and fed into the likeminded sensibilities Eicher was then bringing with increasing confidence to his groundbreaking approach to jazz. It is therefore appropriate that Pärt, the imprint’s shining star, should be represented here more than any other composer or performer.

Thomas Zehetmair’s manually overwhelming and thought-provoking ECM recording of the complete sonatas for unaccompanied violin by Eugène Ysaÿe – released in 2004 to great critical acclaim – offered ample proof that alleged virtuoso pyrotechnics can be surprinsingly multi-faceted and complex when approached by a musician with a rare awareness of stylistic layers and expressive traditions. His (long deleted) Teldec version of the Capricci dating from the early nineties quickly won the status of a new benchmark recording.

The conceit that informs this disc is that Bach and Webern's meditations of life, death, and eternity are essentially complementary, that Bach's Lutheran faith and Baroque aesthetic and Webern's Catholic faith and Modernist aesthetic speak of a shared belief in the luminous and the numinous. Indeed, so pervasive is the conceit that complementary performances of Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in six voices from The Musical Offering opens and closes the disc. And so successful is the conceit that this otherwise tired trick is incredibly effective.

If you thought violinist Gidon Kremer and pianist Martha Argerich's 1986 DG recording of Schumann's two published violin sonatas was the last word in overwhelming passion in the German Romantic composer's late chamber music, try this 2008 ECM disc of the two published sonatas plus the unpublished sonata by violinist Carolin Widmann and pianist Dénes Várjon.

Heinz Holliger's first full length opera is a radical reworking of the Snow White story, with libretto based on the version by Swiss author Robert Walser. The opera opened in Zürich to rave reviews, applauded for its energy, invention, wit and psychological insight. Soprano singer Juliane Banse was singled out for her exceptionally inspired performance in the title role. This New Series recording features the original cast, under the direction of the composer.

Eagerly anticipated album by Georgia’s Giya Kancheli (“the most important composer to have emerged from the former Soviet Union since the death of Shostakovich.” – Time Magazine), released in the year of his 70th birthday. This disc features one of Kancheli’s most ardent champions, the great violinist Gidon Kremer., who plays in duo with his old comrade, Russian pianist Oleg Maisenberg on the 26 minute 'Time… and again”, and leads the Kremerata Baltica on “V & V” for violin, taped voice, and string orchestra.

As a tireless champion of new interpretations of the old, the ever-adventurous Gidon Kremer has over the years forged a lasting relationship with, above most others, the music of Franz Schubert. One can only imagine, then, the excitement he must have felt when he learned of composer Victor Kissine’s having finished a string orchestral version of Schubert’s G-major String Quartet (op. posth. 161, D 887).

British composer Ambrose Field is primarily known for his work in electronic music, much of it using the sounds of the natural world and of industrial and post-industrial society to create gritty and audacious musique concrète soundscapes. On this album, he takes fragments of vocal music by the great fifteenth century Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay and weaves them into allusive electronic landscapes of considerable subtlety.

Various vocalists and lutenists specializing in the late Renaissance have constructed artificial tours of the European continent, but soprano Monika Mauch and lutenist Nigel North rely here on an original source to do the same thing. They emerge with a superior product in every way. The original source in question is the book whose cover text is reproduced on the back cover of the CD box: Robert Dowland's A Musical Banquet, published in London in 1610. Robert Dowland was John Dowland's son, and he had a lot of help in this enterprise from his famous father.

Kim Kashkashian brings Armenia’s leading contemporary composer to ECM New Series in a programme that also explores the roots of Armenian music. Compositions by Tigran Mansurian for viola and percussion, played by Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, receive their premiere recordings here, and frame a selection of Mansurian’s arrangements of the music of Komitas.

After his immigration to the west in 1991, Giya Kancheli abandoned the expansive, symphonic approach he had cultivated during his years in Georgia, and opted instead to compose music for smaller, more manageable ensembles. The works on this ECM New Series disc reflect Kancheli's changed course and his simplified, if still wide-ranging, palette. Diplipito is a cryptic term, coined by poet Joseph Brodsky to mean "my work of silence, my mute creation," and Kancheli uses it to suggest a neutral state between expression and meaninglessness, implied in the singer's indistinguishable words and the cello's vaguely articulated lines.