Dmitry Masleev offers a highly personal diptych with the Dies irae theme running throughout. The pianist serves up these formidable pages with racy, sober, elegant playing, and virtuosity giving way to sensuality and crystal-clear lyricism. One one side we have Liszt's Totentanz (which saw him triumph at the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition) and Rhapsodie espagnole (adapted for piano and string orchestra by his mentor Petukhov) on the other is Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (his composer of choice). The album closes with the Adagio from Marcello's Oboe Concerto, arranged for keyboard by Bach, a kind of vision of heaven after hell.

Vibrant and urgently lyrical playing, possessed of a degree of personality that you would never guess from the bark-bread of the disc's artwork.

For their latest album, recorded live at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, Christian Gerhaher and his long-time duo-partner, Gerold Huber, have revisited the songs of the great Romantic composer Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). Yet it is not their first time: on their debut album in 2002 you´ll already find the ‘Four Serious Songs’ Op. 121, and in 2017 they released their version of ‘Romances from L. Tieck´s Magelone’, Op. 33. However, with this album, they bring single songs and cycles to the fore that testify to an intense striving by Brahms to create a new ‘folk tune’. Embedded into social changes of the 19th century, Brahms here tries to establish the art song as a reflection of its own imagined history as well as a reminiscence and portrayal of a naturalness gradually becoming lost during the rise of the modern world – similar to the ambivalence between tradition and progress, noticeable in his instrumental works.

The Vivaldi Edition is up to its astounding 54th volume with Concerti per Fagotto IV, and this collection introduces a selection of the finest Baroque works for bassoon. In a magical performance, the bassoonist Sergio Azzolini along with the L'Onda Armonica ensemble creates an indispensable recording that entices us into the pieces and compels us through each as if on a journey.

La musique d’Orgue de Nicolas de Grigny constitue un sommet dans la musique pour clavier de la fin du XVIIe siècle. Le texte musical du présent enregistrement est fondé sur la première édition de 1699. Les conventions de l’époque, telles que nous les avons comprises grâce aux recherches des musicologues, ont été prises en considération, notamment en ce qui concerne la pratique de la musica ficta des altérations rétroactives. On mentionne toujours l’influence de de Grigny sur le jeune Bach. L’anecdote de la copie de Bach est bien connue.

Dieterich Buxtehude is one of the key figures of the baroque period. Other musicians and composers like the young Johann Sebastian Bach came from all over Europe to listen to and to learn from him, since his virtuosi abilities on the organ and his knowledge of compositions were legendary. When he was quite old Buxtehude published two collections of instrumental chamber music. Apart from a few occasional works, these are the only examples of his art that were printed during his lifetime. Opus 1, containing seven sonatas for violin and viola da gamba with harpsichord continuo, is undated but probably appeared in 1694.

Compiled from pieces that were clearly composed much earlier as well as from more recent works, the Deuxième Livre pays homage to its two masters and calls for tonalities that it had not yet employed; it evokes the past and the great lutenists of that time with the Pavane and yet also contains important innovations. It is truly a transitional work: published at the very dawn of the century, it opened the doors to the important stylistic changes that French music would undergo during the Age of Enlightenment.

François Devienne (1759-1803), sometimes nicknamed the French Mozart, was equaled famed for his talents as a flautist and a bassoonist. He was one of the first professors at the Paris Conservatoire, established in the early years of the Republic. Devienne devoted a large proportion of his compositions, in several different forms, to the two instruments of which he was a virtuoso exponent. The programme presents several of his trios, which combine the violin and the cello with the two wind instruments in turn. These works possess all the charm of the galant aesthetic that developed in the late eighteenth century, along with a certain penchant for virtuosity.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team.

As the founding father of Finnish music, Jean Sibelius is the measure of all things to such an extent that an outside observer may easily miss the abundance of talented masters who also practiced the art of composition quite successfully in the land of a thousand lakes. One of them was Erkki Melartin. Not ten years younger than the composer of Finlandia, he also left us a significant oeuvre that repeatedly begs a comparison to his older colleague – of course, it is a comparison whose results are subject to debate. To be fair, we can discover a phrase here or there that reminds us of Sibelius; occasionally, some of Mahler's vocabulary may have sneaked in as well; but the persona whose legacy is six mighty symphonies has blazed his own independent trail away from the Romantic tradition, leading us relentlessly to an unheard cosmos.

…This is the best you will ever hear of the "Spiritual Choir-Music of Heinrich Schuetz (1585-1672). This one-disk performance is a selection of ten of the 49 motets in Schuetz's 1648 opus, interspersed with six quite distinct selections from the Kleine Geistliche Konzerte of 1636. The two sources are radically different; the earlier works are in the operatic 'secunda prattica' style of Monteverdi, sung by soloists over decorated basso continuo; the later works are superbly old-fashioned choral polyphony of the 'prima prattica' of composers dead before Schuetz was born. As a concert listening experience, the combination is highly effective, offering a variety and sprightliness that a through-reading of the complete Geistliche Chormusic can't provide.

In 1968, six former choral scholars from King’s College, Cambridge established the King’s Singers, later described by The Times as “the superlative vocal sextet”. The group has always comprised two countertenors, a tenor, two baritones and a bass, and over the years it has proved consistently exceptional for vocal distinction and breadth and diversity of repertoire. This celebratory collection of eight CDs focuses on Renaissance composers from Italy, England, France, Spain, Germany and the Low Countries.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team.

Decca Classics proudly announces Shostakovich & Britten, the new album from internationally acclaimed cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Featuring Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2, performed with John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London, alongside the cello sonatas of Shostakovich and Britten, this deeply personal recording pays tribute to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the towering figure who inspired both composers—and Kanneh-Mason himself.

A new page in the history of the NDR Radiophilharmonie opened in 2024 with the arrival of a sought-after chief conductor, Stanislav Kochanovsky. For harmonia mundi, he has chosen to explore a repertoire that he knows inside out, the music of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia. Here is a chance to hear an expert interpretation of the famous Capriccio espagnol alongside works by Tchaikovsky and Tcherepnin, perhaps less well-known but utterly thrilling!