For their first harmonic mundi album, Florent Albrecht and his Ensemble L’Encyclopédie explore the mischievous world of the Mozarts, father and son. Whether in the well-known Toy Symphony, the tinkling bells of Leopold’s A Musical Sleigh Ride or the ‘How to compose all wrong’ tutorial of Wolfgang’s A Musical Joke, joy and fantasy are mixed with a portion of subtle wit – qualities shared by the polished stylistic approach of the performers.

Amid the pomp of the court, the ear of the young Louis XIV was awakened to the charms of the harpsichord. Surrounded by the most illustrious harpsichordists, he explored a world where music was still a treasure passed from hand to hand. While French harpsichord making flourished, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières published the first printed scores in 1670. From unmeasured preludes, to poignant tombeaux imbued with subtle melancholy, to delicate arrangements of popular airs, the harpsichord of Louis XIV echoes an era of unprecedented musical richness. Brice Sailly's sublime interpretation highlights the splendour and diversity of this golden age of the French harpsichord.

Maurice Ravel’s piano trio was the result of an earlier war insinuating itself into his composition. The work’s first movements, however, were conceived as far from war as imaginable. Early summer 1914 found Ravel at his happiest, holidaying with Alexandre Benois in the Basque town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the Atlantic coast half a mile from Ravel’s birthplace of Ciboure.

In 1392, King Charles VI of France was declared insane. In the midst of the Hundred Years’ War, his repeated absences left the field open to princes hungry for power and wealth.

Crowd Pleaser, the stunning debut album from Texas-raised, Nashville-based songwriter Joelton Mayfield, is the result of nearly a decade of work and reflection.

With his new album, Helmut Eisel presents an extraordinary sound project. Together with his trio and brass players Peter Kästner, Felix Blum and Peter Hedrich, the clarinetist merges the vibrant tradition of klezmer with the warm sonorities of Saarland br…

The French composer and organist Thierry Escaich composed his Te Deum pour Notre-Dame for the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris; a hymn to the Cathedral’s resurrection, it is a large-scale work for children's choir, two mixed choirs and orchestra. One hundred and eighty singers and instrumentalists gave the work its first performance and recorded it in the prestigious building on 12 June 2025.

Ning Feng, together with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin conducted by Antony Hermus, releases the violin concertos of Johannes Brahms and Carl Goldmark. This pairing is particularly apt as these works were both written in 1877, and the composers were dear friends. In Goldmark’s lyrical Violin Concerto, Ning Feng plays the original 5-minute cadenza which is seldom heard in its entirety. Written only a few months after the Goldmark, Brahms’ famous Violin Concerto in D, Op.77 needs little introduction. Ning Feng has long been associated with this concerto, having played it when he won First Prize in the International Paganini Competition 2006 as well as First Prize in the 2005 Michael Hill International Violin Competition.

Although Israel in Egypt was first performed on 4 April 1739 in tripartite form, Handel probably first composed this oratorio without a complete text. Hervé Niquet has chosen to record the version in two parts that Berlioz and the whole of the 19th century considered definitive, these being the Exodus and the Song of Moses. Produced just after the Covid pandemic, this recording also shows the joy of Le Concert Spirituel’s singers and instrumentalists at making music together again: Hervé Niquet says the final chorus "is a cry of happiness in unison" and sees an "almost palpable drama in these works: the two choruses face each other on either side of the orchestra and respond to each other in violent retaliations and monumental unisons. Their interweaving in diabolical movements is like a theatrical staging before our very eyes.”

Kurt Edelhagen was a German big band leader.

It is a journey inward – not only geographically, but musically and spiritually as well. Inside the Island, the new album by Quadro Nuevo, will be released on October 24, 2025, by GLM Music, distributed by Edel (LP/CD) and Kontor New Media (digital). More than a collection of pieces, it is a musical travelogue, born on the Greek island of Samos. There, where waves, light, and sun shape the landscape, where ancient villages slumber in the hills, and a kafenion remains a meeting place for locals, the four musicians withdrew to create music scented with lemons, wild rosemary, and the cheerful melancholy of the South.

These two quartets were written in the summer of 2021. There was a pandemic going on, and I spent most of the summer in my apartment, reading books and feeling the momentum of life melting away in the heat.

‘Little Wanderer’, from William Blake’s dream world, seemed the perfect title for an album in which we are surrounded by myriad landscapes in songs by Benjamin Britten, Imogen Holst and Daniel Kidane.

If Alberto Ginastera had not been born three years after the scandalous premiere of the Sacre du Printemps, he could easily be considered one of the earliest adepts of the "pagan" Stravinsky: The wild rhythms of prehistoric dances, volcanic eruptions of the most complex layers of sound and technical tortures of all kinds permeate his work, which nevertheless manages without formal arbitrariness. The first string quartet from 1948, for example, moves along classical lines, with many a bow losing its horsehair - not unlike the piano quintet premiered in Venice in 1963, which explores the limits of the possible in seven extremely succinct, in the composer's words, "neo-expressionist" sections. In this context, Maurice Ravel's unique string quartet functions as an "impressionistic" antipode and filigree pole of calm.

Christianity in all its forms excels through its high degree of adaptability. We encounter one of the more fascinating examples of adaptation in Latin American Catholicism that developed in the colonies of "New Spain". Not least did the veneration of Mary find especially receptive genius loci here, whose musical disposition soon wedded to an artistic concept that was the non plus ultra for the rulers of the Old World. For some composers, the transatlantic regions thus had such appeal that they abandoned their traditional sphere of activity. One of them was the Italian Ignacio de Jerusalem, who worked at the cathedral in Mexico City; he was joined by the Mexican "home-grown talent" Manuel de Sumaya as well as two Spanish musicians who were only known and beloved in the land of the Aztecs only for their printed works - this yields a truly exquisite mix for Christmas.