From the final drum'n'bass pioneer to release a full-length, Roni Size's New Forms could well be the best. Though it's slightly bloated at two full discs, and slightly overhyped due to its winning Britain's Mercury Prize, New Forms was the major statement on drum'n'bass, barring only Goldie's Timeless. Size's prime asset is his unique style – tough, careening breakbeats and metallic time-stretched effects over the organic, elastic sounds of upright bass and other jazzy add-ons. He also has a knack for deft pacing; though many of his productions test the seven-minute mark, he plays around with the beats so much that no track ever grows boring. On the title track, he weaves two sets of female vocals – American rapper Bahamadia and resident Reprazent diva Onallee – into the mix, digitally syncopating Bahamadia's rap into the production with complete precision. The constantly retriggering breakbeat on "Matter of Fact" makes it another highlight, and Size's transition from the atmospheric "Heroes" to a raging breakbeat storm like "Share the Fall" (both are Onallee features) is astonishing. Yes, Size's production clout is much more apparent on the first disc than the second, but New Forms is laced with so much genius it's worth the price of two discs to own all the excellent productions inside. [A four-CD 20th Anniversary Edition of New Forms was released in 2017, featuring the remastered album plus B-sides on the first two discs; remixes from the likes of Photek, Grooverider, and Peter Kruder on the third disc; and a "live hardware mix" of the album on the fourth disc, featuring previously unreleased edits and remixes by artists including Grooverider, Source Direct, and Krust.]

The folk music of the Baltic peoples can be traced back to pagan times whereas the development of their art music did not start until around 100 years ago. Every country has it's own founding fathers where music is concerned: the Estonians admire Heino Eller and the Latvians Jazeps Vitols as the founder of their respective national music culture. Arvo Part was one of Eller's students. The founding figure of Lithuanian art music and art is Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, who created fugues and sonatas as well as symphonic poems, music for piano, and choral works. This is the ninth and last installment of the SWR Vokalensemble series dedicated to musical portraits of different countries and the last release with it's chief conductor Marcus Creed. The SWR Vokalensemble is internationally renowned as one of the best choirs for modern a cappella repertoire, it's performances are characterized by exquisite mastership.

The disc contains three groups of songs and is completed with the Sinfonietta for large string orchestra. This was a late work (Opus 163 composed in 1986 – the year of his death) but was his first piece for a string orchestra. Hans-Hubert Schönzeler, the conductor on this disc, states that Rubbra told him he wanted to compete in the tradition set by Elgar (Inroduction and Allegro & Serenade), Vaughan Williams (Tallis variations etc.), Holst (St Paul’s suite) and Britten (Frank Bridge variations, simple symphony etc…). The Sinfonietta was first performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra who had wished to commission a work and accepted this one in progress. The two sections, Andante con moto ma non flessibile and Lento run contiguously through a held bass line.

Sinfonia of London and John Wilson present an album that celebrates the golden age of Hollywood. Sinfonia of London rose to fame in the 1950s as the leading recording orchestra of the day, appearing in the musical credits of more than 300 films, including the 1958 soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Reformed by John Wilson in 2018 as a recording orchestra, and made-up of some of London’s finest orchestral musicians, their first recording of Korngold’s Symphony in F# won the orchestral award from BBC music magazine, and drew critical acclaim worldwide. Korngold’s Overture from the private lives of Elizabeth and Essex which opens the programme is an excellent demonstration of his rich, chromatic sound-world that set a blue-print for the Hollywood sound and so many composers that followed. Although the songs were written by Harold Arlen, it was Herbert Stothart’s score for The Wizard of Oz that won the Oscar, and it is his suite from the movie that features here. There are also suites from Max Steiner’s Now, Voyager and Franz Waxman’s Rebecca (receiving here it’s premiere recording). Shorter pieces from David Raksin, Frederick Loewe, Johnny Mandel and Alfred Newman complete this rewarding programme.

In 1928 Maurice Ravel described the violin and the piano as “essentially incompatible.” Yet, by then, he had already composed for those instruments two sonatas (one of which was published posthumously), Tzigane, and the Berceuse sur le nom de [Gabriel] Fauré - a miraculous output for a supposedly mismatched duo.

Northern Europe was a fertile ground for lyrical music: it has borrowed many memorable historical figures but is also indebted to it for many masterpieces by Baroque composers. Handel and Bach come to mind, of course, but we would be forgetting the Heinichen, Schürmann, Keiser and Telemann, whose brilliant opera music is so rarely performed. Many of them have portrayed monarchs, terrible or majestic, in their operatic works - roles that, unlike their southern colleagues, the composers of the Septentrion do not hesitate to entrust to lower voices.

Regular duet and two-piano partners, Hélène Mercier and Louis Lortie have returned to the studio for this all-Debussy programme. The album features duets written by the composer himself – such as the Petite Suite, the Six Épigraphes antiques, and the Marche écossaise sur un thème populaire, as well as a number of arrangements of his solo piano pieces (the Première Arabesque, La Fille aux cheveux de lin, and the Ballade slave). The album ends with André Caplet’s monumental arrangement of Debussy’s best-known orchestral work, La Mer. Stripping the work of its orchestral colours, this two-piano version allows the listener to appreciate more easily Debussy’s ground-breaking harmonic innovation. The album was recorded in the concert hall at Snape Maltings, in Suffolk, using a pair of Bösendorfer 280 VC grand pianos.

Vivaldi's concerti con molti stromenti are true precursors of the symphony in their amplitude and audacity. In these pieces, the 'Red-haired Priest', a creator of boundless imagination, amused himself by devising literally unheard-of combinations of timbres. In the famous concerto Il Mondo al rovescio (The world upside down), he invited flutes, oboes and harpsichord to double violin and cello in a colourfl whirlwind of parallel octaves. This recording by Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti provides an opportunity to discover these incredibly modern compositions.

Zartong were a quartet of Armenian musicians who moved to France and released a self-titled debut album before promptly vanishing in the late 70's, and a fascinating and unpredictable prog curio it turned out to be! A mostly instrumental work that jumps in all sorts of directions, prominent spacey synth-driven symphonic prog moments suddenly give way to plentiful folk interludes and Turkish flavoured diversions, electronic ambience, Zeuhl weirdness, jazz-fusion fire and poppier vocal breaks (not to mention some dreaded yet unsurprising light disco elements due to the era it arrived in!). The album has a distinctive and very unique sound due to two of the musicians playing a santour (an Iranian instrument similar to a zither) and a kamancha, a type of oriental violin.

The song cycles of Ralph Vaughan Williams recorded here, some of them including instruments other than the piano, are some of his most characteristic early works. One hears both his growing interest in folk song and his indebtedness to Ravel, put together with a piquant kind of youthful ambition. In the opening Four Hymns for tenor, piano, and viola, the generally agnostic or atheist Vaughan Williams composed some lovely examples in the rare genre of religious art song. The only really well-known set here is 1909's On Wenlock Edge, and the Britishness of the whole project is shown by the fact that the annotator does not feel it necessary to name the author of the texts. It is A.E. Housman, whose faux-simple verses are ideally suited to the natural voice of tenor Nicky Spence.