Eleni Karaindrou's long, fruitful partnership with Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos has given birth to several scores for his award-winning films. However, perhaps no previous Karaindrou score contains the evocative power of her compositions for Ulysses' Gaze, the film about memory, artistic quests, and war that won the Grand Prix du Jury at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.

What's interesting about the latest outing from this prolific chamber group is not so much that they've chosen to create string quartet adaptations of music from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance – after all, these are folks who have commissioned arrangements of Jimi Hendrix and Bo Diddley, so we've learned not to be shocked – but rather that they've chosen to juxtapose the works of Machaut, Pérotin and Tye with pieces by John Cage, Moondog and Harry Partch, among other twentieth-century notables.

Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko is the latest in a group of young performers championed by the revived Sony Classical label. She's got personality to spare, and, from the looks of the pictures, charisma, too. Arabesque seems to be an album designed to showcase her suitability for a wide variety of roles; the program runs from Mozart forward through the 19th century and includes the Italian, French, and German languages (not that you get any of the texts in the CD booklet).

The CD format for opera on records coincides with (and perhaps encourages) the modern habit in the opera house of running two or more acts together without an interval. Some operas benefit from this, but I don't think Faust is one of them. It strikes a genial bargain. ''I won't waste your time,'' it promises, ''but don't bother to come along if you haven't got a full evening-out to spare.''

On Ellis Island, the Irish Tenors offer the soundtrack to their PBS special. The performance, which took place in New York City in early 2001, is a smooth and classy effort that complements the incredible talent and power that this group possesses. Although many of these songs may be familiar to listeners, the versions offered here are very good and give the songs the power and clarity they deserve.

This is a very good recording of a selection of Vivaldi's "concerti a quattro" - concertos for string orchestra without a solo instrument. Here we have a selection from the vast Vivaldi archive in Turin, selected, as Standage tells us, "on musical and pragmatic grounds with the aim of presenting an attractive cross-section".

With this album, Simon Standage continues his survey of the 40 odd concertos for strings by Vivaldi. As with period practice, winds are added to a few of the works. The continuo consists of harpsichord and guitar, the latter a very appealing sounding period instrument. There is less unity of mood on this album than on Volume 1 of this series. Instead, one is prone to gasp at Vivaldi's prodigious invention.

Carl Orff's Stravinskian rabble-rouser retains its appeal. The pagan high-jinks, driving rhythms, and dips into semi-hysteria can be irresistible given the right performance. And, of course, with its dynamic range, from delicately colored quiet passages to heaven-storming climaxes, it's tailor-made for showing off hi-fi systems. Telarc is known for its outstanding sound, and this one's well up to the house standards.

The piano remained the main instrument of Beethoven throughout his life, and this specially priced 4-CD box set represents his entire and sizeable output for piano and orchestra, starting with the early Piano Concerto in E flat, WoO 4 – a work of tremendous energy and great technical demands, which Beethoven wrote when he was just twelve years old – and ending with Piano Concerto No. 5, the only one that Beethoven never performed himself in concert, due to his developing deafness.

Passions run high in the operas and madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, and they dominate Capella Mediterranea's 2016 release on Alpha-Classics, I 7 Peccati Capitali (The Seven Deadly Sins). Interpreted here as the seven deadly sins of sloth, envy, pride, greed, gluttony, lust, and wrath, and accompanied by corresponding virtues listed as hope, extravagance, chastity, humility, temperance, charity, and courage, the excerpts from Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, and Orfeo…

Tomas Breton's La Dolores from 1895–in which all the male characters love the heroine, Dolores, who works in an inn–is an opera espagnola: a full-blown opera, not a zarzuela, and its plot, characters, mood, and music could belong to no other country but Spain. Breton's musical idiom is late romantic, and he's a fine composer. The opera's acts build with good intensity, and throughout he keeps the local flavor alive with dances and rhythms that are peculiarly Spanish.

Béatrice et Bénédict, Berlioz's last completed work, is based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, but the libretto, by the composer, dispenses with most of the intrigue of the original and reduces the plot to a single premise: Béatrice et Bénédict mask their affection for each other by squabbling, and then finally come to their senses and get married. Although designated an opera, it is closer in effect to an opéra comique because of its very extensive use of spoken dialogue.

The songs of Alice Tegner and Gustaf Nordqvist have been sung and loved by generations of Swedish people, particularly children. Tegner’s songs for children were published into a series which made its way into many schools and homes across Sweden. A lesser-known genre of the two composers is focused on in this new release: music for mixed choir. Both composers held important choral positions, Tegner composing for and leading a chapel choir, and Nordqvist enjoying a respected position in the capitol.

Conductor and pianist James Levine is one of the powerhouse figures of the classical music scene today. As a child he undertook both piano and violin; he was so accomplished on the violin that at the age of ten he played Mendelssohn's second violin concerto at a Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra youth concert. He studied piano at various summer music festivals before enrolling at New York's Juilliard School, where he took conducting courses with Jean Morel and continued piano studies with Rosina Lhevinne.

The Missa Ave Maris Stella, with its lyrically reverential mood and long duo and trio passages, is among Josquin Desprez's most popular masses, and the listener can choose from among recordings by top Renaissance a cappella vocal groups. This one by the Netherlands ensemble Cappella Pratensis presents itself as hyperauthentic. Backed by a booklet essay from Josquin specialist Jennifer Bloxam, the group purports to re-create the practices, discourse, and atmosphere that would have attended a performance of the mass in the papal chapel around the year 1500.