Jules Verne was the inspiration for Offenbach’s opéra-féerie, premiered in 1875. The Parisian craze for this type of musical extravaganza stemmed from its impressive stage effects: for Le Voyage dans la Lune, two ballets and some twenty sets took the audience from the Earth to the Moon, successively recreating the Paris Observatory, a working blast furnace and the crater of an erupting volcano. The piece is studded with zany characters and imaginary places: a lunar landscape, a glass palace, mother-of-pearl galleries, etc. The producers even borrowed a dromedary and an ostrich from the zoo at the Jardin d’Acclimatation! To accompany this theatrical display, Offenbach composed a series of colourful, picturesque hit numbers, wittily and energetically performed here by a team of enthusiastic soloists.The Chœur et Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie are placed under the subtle and precise direction of Pierre Dumoussaud.

American organist James D. Hicks continues his explorations of organ music by Nordic region composers with this 3-album set, played upon the Paschen Kiel pipe organ at Central Pori Church, Pori Finland. James D. Hicks is a concert organist living and working out of Califon, New Jersey, USA. A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Yale University and the University of Cincinnati, Hicks has also studied at the Royal School of Church Music in the UK. Jim held liturgical positions throughout the country over the course of thirty five years, and now devotes himself to concert and recording projects.

For this complete recording of Johannes Brahms' piano trios, the internationally successful Salzburg violinist Thomas Albertus Irnberger chose his usual top-class ensemble partners. Irnberger has long had an intense artistic friendship with the versatile cellist David Geringas, who, like the Russian-born pianist Lilya Zilberstein, can point to a number of recordings that are as long as they are impressive.The Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8 can be heard here in the revised version, which closes the time gap of almost 25 years to the other two trios (No. 2 in C major, Op. 87 and No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101), since the revision took place after the completion of these works and thus at the peak of Brahmsian compositional art.
For the Trio for Clarinet, Violoncello and Piano in A minor, Op. 114, Brahms envisaged the viola as an alternative instrumentation from the very beginning, which is mastered by Irnberger as brilliantly as the violin.

When this cycle of the symphonies of Shostakovich with Dmitri Kitajenko conducting the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln was released in 2005, Shostakovich cycles were no longer the novelties they had been in the latter years of the twentieth century. There were already several superlative cycles in circulation – the monumental Kondrashin, the modernist Rozhdestvensky, the anguished Barshai – and a pair of superlative cycles nearing completion – the commanding Jansons and the compelling Gergiev – when the Kitajenko – Köln cycle was issued on Capriccio in superaudio sound…

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