Two alumni of the St Petersburg Conservatory are brought together on this recording – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Valery Gergiev, both educated in the same historic city a hundred years apart.

Portico Quartet sound like nothing you ever heard before. The Mercury nominated East London based outfit's unique music has expanded to embrace new sonic territories. Drawing on the inspiration of electronica, ambient, classical and dance music as they take their strange, beautiful, cinematic, future music to exciting new vistas where the inspiration of Burial, Mount Kimbie and Flying Lotus rubs shoulders with the textures of Arve Henriksen and Bon Iver and echoes of Steve Reich and Max Richter. But all underpinned by a shared joy in collective music making as the band push their inimitable music into the future.

Cara Dillon is an Irish folk singer. Сага Dillon has a rare talent that you only come across a handful times in your whole life. Her staggeringly beautiful voice has the ability to reach inside the soul of a song and imbue material with not only profound sweetness but also poignancy and depth.

Thomas Dolby, the iconic '80s star whose smash hits ''She Blinded Me With Science'' and ''Hyperactive'' helped define the MTV generation/revolution, will break his 20-year silence with A Map of the Floating City. The album, featuring appearances by special guest artists Mark Knopfler, Regina Spektor, Natalie MacMaster, Bruce Woolley, Imogen Heap and Eddi Reader. Of the album, which is divided into three parts, Dolby says, "The new songs are organic and very personal. A Map of the Floating City is a travelogue across three imaginary continents: In Amerikana I'm reflecting with affection on the years I spent living in the U.S.A., and my fascination with its roots music. Urbanoia is a dark place, a little unsettling… I'm not a city person. And in Oceanea I return to my natural home on the windswept coastline".

"Water Night" is the album from the visionary composer behind the Virtual Choir and follows up his Grammy award-winning album, "Light and Gold". The Daily Telegraph, London, describes Whitacre as "that rare thing, a modern composer who is both popular and original".

In early 2008, Herbert was commissioned by a collaborative project between Peter Gabriel and Bowers & Wilkins to record an acoustic album at Gabriel's Real World Studios. The result of these sessions - "Ten Lives" - was released as a digital download in July 2008, available only from the Bowers & Wilkins website as part of their Music Club.

With their unmistakable sound of Welsh language vocals shimmering alongside swamp guitar, harp, rhythm section and a subtle use of technology, 9Bach have been widely credited with giving a new voice to Welsh song. Their previous album, Tincian, (also featured on Society of Sound) was described by The Line of Best Fit as "ripped through with transcendence; a brooding melancholy as much as a gossamer dreaminess", and was voted Best Album at the 2015 BBC Radio 2 Awards by the public.

Joseph Arthur was born in Ohio-native and in his life has recorded and released a number of albums in rock, folk, pop. In this record, a variety of songs - vocal and instrumental, of nakrotikah and autobiographical, and many other stories. Arthur describes his new record as "some of the richest music I've made in 17 years of putting music together. "Boogie Christ" is a psychedelic soul record about redemption and what happens after you find and lose it".

If there's such a thing as the opposite of writer's block, Joseph Arthur has it. The Akron, Ohio-bred/Brooklyn, NY-resiciing singer/songwriter, who once released four EPs in the span of as many months, has demonstrated his unwavering proclivity yet again with the release of "Redemption City", a 24-song double album.

The Mariinsky label was launched in May 2009 with a ground-breaking recording of Shostakovich’s early opera The Nose, which received much praise and many awards. Gergiev continues to work his way through the Shostakovich oeuvre with the Mariinsky and here adds the two piano concertos, plus the fifth piano concerto by the popular Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin.

"Seven Shades, Lighter" from Nigerian singer and songwriter, Ola Onabule is a special preview of Ola’s seventh studio album, Seven Shades Darker, coming later in 2011.

An achingly lush chamber-folk album with crystalline harmonies, recorded in the dead of a Toronto winter in a church and the basement of the band's house. The band recommend listening to it in a cozy space with a roaring fire nearby.

Inspired by Rimbaud's poem, Ophelie, Bologna-based trio Ofeliadorme live up to their name. Seductive, tender, immersive, and shrouded in a mystery befitting ancient prose, theirs is a crossroads between the serenity of Cocteau Twins, Portishead's emotive darkness, and PJ Harvey's shape shifting pop qualities. It's ambient, New Wave, dreamy, stargazing electronica. One part foggy warmth, another stark desperation, the results are truly unique, and utterly compelling.

Awarded Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2007 Evelyn Glennie is the first person in musical history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist. As one of the most eclectic and innovative musicians on the scene today she is constantly redefining the goals and expectations of percussion by creating performances of such vitality they almost constitute a new type of performance. Evelyn is the leading commissioner of around 170 new works for solo percussion from many of the world's most eminent composers. As a double Grammy award winner and BAFTA nominee Evelyn is in demand as a composer in her own right and records high quality music for film, television and music library companies. With over 86 international awards to date Evelyn continues to feed the next generation through advice and guidance.

David Rhodes, Peter Gabriel's guitarist-of-choice for the last three decades, is explaining why it's taken him so long to take centre-stage and record the first record under his own name. He's typically modest and "quite strong" is something of an understatement. The songs on "Bittersweet", released through the B&W Society Of Sound, reveal a hidden talent, someone whose clear songwriting skills fully deserve any belated limelight thrust in their direction.