Nick Cave is an artist who has never shied away from exploring the darker side of the human experience, often in broadly gothic strokes on his early albums but with a growing degree of nuance and compassion as Cave and his work matured. But a very real and deeply painful tragedy was visited on Cave while he was working on his 16th solo album, Skeleton Tree. His 15-year-old son Arthur Cave died when he fell from a cliff in July 2015, and while the writing and recording was already underway when the youngster suffered his accident, the grief and pain of loss Cave felt is palpable throughout this album. Skeleton Tree is relatively modest in scale – it runs just 40 minutes, the cover artwork is minimal, and the music lacks the dramatic, grand-scale arrangements of Cave's albums of the 21st century.

Raw to the Bone is the 13th album by rock band Wishbone Ash. Like its predecessor, Twin Barrels Burning, it is one of the band's heaviest records, capitalising on the popular new wave of British heavy metal that Wishbone Ash had helped influence. It is the only Wishbone Ash album to feature Mervyn Spence on bass and vocals. It is also the last album with guitarist/vocalist Laurie Wisefield, who ended his eleven-year stint with Wishbone Ash after the release of this album.

Wolfgang Katschner and the Lute Compagney provide the oratorios 'Jonas' and 'Judicium extremum' with a Dixit Dominus and a Magnificat, which in their expressiveness are in no way inferior to the more popular oratorios.

Die sogenannte ,,Alte Musik-Szene" ist in einer noch vor ein paar Jahren für undenkbar gehaltenen Expansion begriffen. Fast jeden Tag werden neue Ensembles gegründet und neue ,,alte" Werke zum ersten Mal der stummen Vergangenheit entrissen. Wir leben - wie wohl nie zuvor - auf Du und Du mit unserer jahrhundertealten Musikgeschichte.

For its first recording for BIS Records, the Marmen Quartet tackles three major works from the twentieth-century string quartet literature. The two quartets by György Ligeti belong to two different periods in the composer’s output. Written before Ligeti left Hungary and emigrated to the West, the First, subtitled ‘Métamorphoses nocturnes’, represents the peak of his ‘Hungarian’ period. Regarded as a virtuoso exercise, the work reveals the influences of Béla Bartók, particularly from his Third and Fourth Quartets.

Gilels had immense physical power and impeccable control, but he was also capable of exquisitely refined poetry and had an acute perception of the lyrical impulse lying behind even the most assertive of Brahms's writing. The firmness of attack and the depth of sound that make his (and the Berlin Philharmonic's) playing so thrillingly dynamic can be offset by the most poignant of delicate gestures. There is undeniable grandeur to these readings, but with those additional qualities of wise thinking, generous expression and artistry of great subtlety, these performances are in a class of their own.