The Venetian poet Antonio Conti received from Marcello the commission for a dramatic text that allows a quick succession of events, rather than the usual succession of recitative and arias.
Cassandra plunges us into Homer’s Trojan War, with its namesake prophetess who has the gift of predicting the future, but whom no one believes. The many [25] extant copies of this cantata, here given its world première recording, testify to the impact it had in its own time.

Gustavo Diaz-Jerez is one of the leading composers and pianists in Spain. His compositional output spans all genres, from solo works to opera. His works have been premiered by prestigious ensembles and orchestras. His orchestral work Ymarxa, commissioned by the XXVII Canary Islands Music Festival, was premiered by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit. In 2018, his first opera was premiered, La casa imaginaria. This album represents the culmination of more than ten years of compositional work. A unique endeavour in the history of music in the Canary Islands, it comprises seven symphonic poems almost two and a half hours of music which evoke the landscapes and natural beauty of the Canaries.

The Squarcialupi Codex is an extensive, lavishly decorated manuscript of the Italian Trecento and was compiled around 1410. The manuscript contains works by twelve composers – including Francesco Landini, Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da Bologna, and Lorenzo da Firenze – and presents them in chronological order.

In her first chamber music album Claire Huangci- together with Solenne Païdassi, violin Adrien Boisseau, viola and Tristan Cornut, cello- devotes herself to two works by Maurice Ravel and Ernest Chausson. As the debut album of Trio Machiavelli and Adrien Bosseau as support for Chausson, this album is a calling card that is worth seeing. Claire Huangci, the young American pianist of Chinese descent and 2018 Geza Anda Competition first prize and Mozart prize winner, has succeeded in establishing herself as a highly respected artist, captivating audiences with her "radiant virtuosity, artistic sensitivity, keen interactive sense and subtle auditory dramaturgy" (Salzburger Nachrichten). Her unusually diverse repertoire, in which she also takes up rarely performed works, is illustrative of her remarkable versatility.

Hungarian-born pianist Klára Würtz has amassed an astounding catalogue of recordings for Brilliant Classics, celebrated this year (a milestone birthday year for Klára) with this rich set of piano solos, song and chamber music collaborations, and concertante outings.

Following his first successful release featuring the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Violin, Piano and Strings by the Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin, Frank Dupree presents a selection of the little-known master's works for solo piano, performed as originally written, while bassist Jakob Krupp and drummer Obi Jenne improvise around him. There is surely no better example of jazz poured so expertly into a classical mould.

This volume concludes the complete Sibelius symphonies performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Santtu-Matias Rouvali. This series has already won numerous awards around the world and reaches its climax here with two of Sibelius’ greatest symphonies: Andrew Mellor writes in his introductory text that "we hear music carried by forms of gravitational energy reminiscent of those that govern the course of a river". Rouvali has also chosen to record eight extracts from Sibelius’ incidental music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest. First performed in March 1926, it is one of Sibelius's final orchestral works and is certainly his most fascinating composition for the theatre.

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.

Atalanta Fugiens is considered by many to be the most beautiful and the most thought-provoking emblem book of all time, with an author in Michael Maier (1568-1622) who was a celebrated alchemist and physician at the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In the final eight years of an eventful and much-travelled life, Maier created a series of illustrated alchemist works, among which Atalanta Fugiens is undoubtedly the most important.

The final volume of Paul Hindemiths (1895-1963) youthful and fresh Kammermusik series from the 1920s includes Kammermusik Nos. 47 performed by Kronberg Academy Soloists and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra under a true Hindemith specialist, Christoph Eschenbach, who has won a Grammy for a previous Hindemith album on Ondine. These four works by Hindemith can be considered as full-bodied concertos for violin, viola, viola damore and organ. These work feature four young talented soloists, Stephen Waarts, Rimothy Ridout, Ziyu Shenand Christian Schmitt.

Wounderfull recording by Paola Erdas of the Intavolatura of Valente, first music book exclusively dedicated to harpsichord, played on two XVIth century Napolitan instrument of an extraordinary beauty.

The Choir of the West is the premier choral ensemble of the Department of Music at Pacific Lutheran University, located in Tacoma, Washington. The choir was founded in 1926, and was the third Lutheran college choir to tour extensively throughout the United States. Choir of the West has toured to Europe, Scandinavia, Japan and China, and has been selected to appear at several regional and national conferences of the National Association for Music Education and the American Choral Directors Association.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - The Symphonic Testament: Following a long maturation process, Jordi Savall presents his interpretation of Mozart’s Last Three Symphonies. He has chosen - on this double album - to repeat the Symphony No. 40 twice, in order to underline the continuity existing from one work to the other (this is an important dimension of this milestone of the orchestral music in the XVIIIth Century).