The key to Buxtehude’s trio sonatas, both for performers and for listeners, is an awareness of the stylus fantasticus which German composers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed in response to the new freely inventive style of Italian composers such as Claudio Merulo and Girolamo Frescobaldi. ‘It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing,’ wrote one contemporary theorist. ‘It is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject, instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues.’

John Stanley was born in London on 17 January 1712. A precocious musician, by the age of nine he was playing the organ (probably as an occasional deputy) at All Hallows, Bread Street. When the titular organist there – the composer and harpsichordist William Babell, a former pupil of Handel – died on 23 September 1723, an eleven year-old Stanley was appointed in his place. At the age of 14 he was chosen as organist at St. Andrew’s, Holborn and at the age of 17 became the youngest person ever to obtain the BMus degree from Oxford University. In 1734 he was appointed organist to the Society of the Inner Temple, a position he held until his death.

Recorded in Perugia between 2023 and 2025, a major new set of Schumann’s song output for mixed voices – vocal duets, trios and quartets – by a fine team of Italian singers, and led by the pianist Filippo Farinelli.

Billy Joel Drops Massive 155-Song ‘And So It Goes’ Companion Playlist. Seven-hour playlist features unreleased live recordings and outtakes, including the first-ever performance of "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant". Following the premiere of the second part of Billy Joel’s And So It Goes documentary, the Piano Man dropped a massive 155-song companion album on digital services featuring unreleased recordings and more.

Probably the most perfect version ever recorded of Mozart’s concertos with the incredibly difficult Natural Horn. The use of period instruments, a movement which began in the middle of the past century, is no longer a passing fad or something novel. Rather, it represents a fundamental part of our musical culture whose importance goes far beyond the simple nostalgic or poetic recreation of a score. The “archaic” technical characteristics of period instruments often force performers to seek solutions that, while resulting in a sound closer to historical reality, often surprise the listener. Technical constraints are even more evident in wind instruments, given that the significant evolution in their construction has accentuated the differences that emerged over the course of their development.

Tomorrow Held is the visionary new album by twenty-something mould-breakers and conservatoire-trained virtuosos, fiddle player Owen Spafford and guitarist Louis Campbell. Eight largely instrumental tracks that hold space, resolve into mystery, that fold in elements of jazz, post-rock and chamber classical music while raiding the folk music toolbox. Call it what you want: post-folk. Trad-noir. Folk nihilism. Then know that Spafford Campbell are blazing a trail that erases genre, finds gold in the embers. Forget about tomorrow, they say. Welcome to the now.

Buddy Guy Announces New Album ‘Ain’t Done With The Blues’ Buddy Guy Announces New Album ‘Ain’t Done With The Blues’ and Shares New Single “How Blues Is That?” Feat Guitarist Joe Walsh A multi-Grammy Award-winning blues icon, Buddy Guy is widely regarded as an architect of the Blues—a pivotal artist whose innovative guitar work and raw vocal style helped shape the sound of modern R&B. He is here to tell the masses that he ‘Ain’t Done With The Blues’ via the announcement of his brand new album set to release via Silvertone/RCA Records on July 30, his 89th birthday.

Sunset Boulevard, a 5CD box set and 2LP vinyl edition of Elvis Presley’s 1970s recordings in Los Angeles, is to be released by RCA/Legacy in early August. Over half of the 89 tracks on the 5CD edition are previously unreleased.

"Die Kunst der Fuge" (The Art of Fugue) is the fifth album in the Bach series by Jorg Halubek and his ensemble il Gusto Barocco - the think tank for the music baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach. The new recording is led by Jorg Halubek, who plays the historic German Silbermann Organ from 1737. Together with the Early Music ensemble il Gusto Barocco, they present a unique interpretation of the world famous Bach composition "The Art of Fugue".

Chromatics is a word derived from the Greek noun (khrma), meaning color, and the Greek adjective (khrmatiks; colored). During the Renaissance, new music was composed in the Western world, opening up a palette of (timbral) colors for the first time. Before the Renaissance, music (in Gregorian chant) existed only to convey the word, not to make an appearance itself; this changed completely after the 15th century. Music, like painting, exploded into new forms and colors, and the era of the modern age was ushered in. Strange harmonies, mysterious voices - tones of passion and desire, of terror and fear, of the confusion of the sublime or of divine apparition… This is the world of musical colors that opened up in the age of the Chromatic Renaissance, giving rise to a music that is daring, adventurous and timelessly modern.

Chopin’s 21 Nocturnes, often described as ‘songs of the night’, are among the most well-known and beautiful of Chopin’s short solo piano works.

Chamber music, in it's centuries-long course, presents the most varied and surprising instrumental combinations: strings, woodwinds, percussion and keyboard instruments have, over time, found almost infinite possibilities of combination. If we wanted to limit ourselves to music composed for three instruments, the differences in instrumentation that tradition allows us to know would even number in the hundreds. In spite of this, however, a trio consisting of guitar, piano and harp has never before been thought of or realised by anyone, in any sphere or in any era.

Paul Hindemith described Reger as ‘the last giant of music’. When Schoenberg founded his Society for Private Musical Performances in 1918, Max Reger, along with Debussy and Bartók, was one of the most frequently performed composers. Admiring Reger as an important innovator, Schoenberg promoted his music because ‘he still remains unfamiliar’ and ‘I consider him a genius’. Even a century after his death, much of Reger’s music appears on concert programmes only very occasionally. This new album by the Gävle Symphony Orchestra and conductor Jaime Martín includes two of Reger’s finest orchestral works written towards the end of his life.

Preserved in three different libraries, the Marciana in Venice, the Library of the Naples Conservatory, and the State and University Library in Hamburg, the six cantatas that make up this world-premiere recording were composed by Benedetto Marcello in the early 18th century. These are thus youthful works, quite interesting for the originality of their writing, which helps us understand why their author was so highly regarded during his lifetime - even called the “prince of music” - and also by posterity, as he managed to blend his personal sensibility with lessons drawn from tradition and the influences of a life rich in cultural encounters.

Martin Tingvall is on the road all over the world both as a solo pianist and with his trio. PA VÄG (English: on the way / on the way) is the program for this. The themes of the piece seem at the same time familiar, almost classical, but also groping, searching and full of surprises.