This Valette is one of the most stupendous geniuses we have and his music is stupendous too. This is how the famed Sebastian de Brossard introduces his contemporary composer Joseph Valette de Montigny. Though acknowledged for its qualities, Montigny’s music has very rarely been played. Nor has it ever been recorded. Simply on account of its rarity and the absence of scores, it has remained unpublished.

In 2018, the Styriarte Festival in Graz launched, in collaboration with Zefiro, a project to rediscover the operatic output of the Styrian composer Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), Kapellmeister at the imperial court in Vienna for forty years, with the aim of restaging six of his nineteen operas, one per year. With a cast of Baroque vocal specialists, led by Monica Piccinini and Arianna Venditelli, this set of Dafne in lauro marks the beginning of a new series in which Arcana will release the recordings made in the course of the six-year cycle.

Max Bruch was eighty years old when, in 1918, he decided to return to the chamber music genre he had frequented in his early years. Stimulated by the violin virtuoso Willy Hess, he composed two string quintets and an octet, monuments to beauty and harmony, at the end of a tumultuous personal life and in the midst of a western world on the brink of collapse. After an album devoted to Beethoven’s chamber music, the Chamber Players of the WDR Sinfonieorchester now tackle one of the last chapters of German Romantic music, with pieces that constitute Bruch’s swansong.

Paris, early Twentieth Century: in the space of three ballets, a previously unknown Russian composer revolutionised the music of his time. With The Firebird and Petrushka, respectively fairytale and folktale, and of course The Rite of Spring, a telluric invocation with its insanely innovative harmonies and rhythms, Stravinsky dynamised the Late Romantic orchestra, taking it to literally unheard-of places.

The extreme social trauma that followed The Great War of 1914—18 engulfed Europe. In this context, English composer Frank Bridge is an intriguing figure: his musical language transformed to embrace a radically new harmonic style. Consequently, his popularity waned and it was not until the end of the century that his importance as a leading modernist was appreciated.

A studio album by Roger Chapman is always an event. Since '66, when the British singer-songwriter emerged as the voice of his generation with the seminal Family band, through every twist of his four-decade solo career, Chappo's output has defied music industry protocol, challenged genre, and held up a mirror to the times. "I've never stopped writing," he reflects, "and with Life In The Pond, I felt the need to hear what I'd put down in music."

His Debussy and Chopin recordings for harmonia mundi already offer ample evidence that Alain Planès is highly adept at selecting a period instrument best suited for the repertoire.

20th anniversary remastered reissue of M. Ward's sophomore album. M. Ward's second solo enterprise verifies the artist as one of those few songwriters who stand between the cracks of time, where he spins a hallucinatory, new universe out of old-world roots. Indeed, there's a real down-home, unpolished luster to End of Amnesia, both in execution and in songwriting, that gives it a timeless, old-fashioned pallor.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fela Kuti's classic Open & Close, Knitting Factory Records is pleased to announce the first vinyl pressing since the 1980s. This edition features a return to the original gatefold jacket and will be pressed on red and yellow butterfly effect vinyl. Limited edition of 7000.

Arv Garrison is relatively unknown today. His professional recording career spanned three years after the end of WWII. A majority of that legacy was with the Vivien Garry Trio. The Trio’s first recordings for Guild and Sarco demonstrated Arv’s phenomenal mastery of the electric guitar. He was on several Dial sessions led by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Howard McGhee, but his presence on these recordings is sparse due to the short duration of 78 singles.

Bassist Gary Peacock (1935-2020) made his first recordings in the West Coast between 1959 and 1962. He was in his mid-20s when he arrived in Los Angeles, and although his talent was starting to get some recognition, not many would have counted Peacock among the most proficient young bassists in jazz. After the release of these recordings, there were few who wouldn't have.

I Know I’m Funny haha is Webster’s most realized manifestation yet of this emotional and musical alchemy. Continuing to bloom from her 2019 breakthrough and Secretly Canadian debut Atlanta Millionaires Club, Webster’s sound draws as much from the lap-steel singer-songwriter pop of the 1970s and teardrop country tunes as it does from the audacious personalities of her city’s rap and R&B community.

The only complete survey available of the keyboard music written by a forward-looking contemporary of Monteverdi.

New to the catalogue, delightful chamber music by an Italian celebrity of 18th-century London.

Each one of Bohuslav Martinů’s (1890-1959) three cello sonatas belongs to a significant period or event in his life. Composed in May 1939, the first seems indelibly marked by the tension and anxiety which gripped Europe in the months before war broke out, though the composer was also going through a crisis in his personal life, having lately had an intense extramarital affair with Vítězslava Kaprálová, a young composer and conductor.