For every musician connected with church music, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a highlight of the liturgical year, and it was at a performance of this very work that we first met. Playing together in the continuo unit requires a seventh sense for one’s fellow musicians and a heightened awareness of the musical breath of the soloists. In short, it requires non-verbal communication. The feeling of being able to rely on each other, and the perfect rapport in our musical understanding, kindled our desire to record a completely novel kind of music album.

2022 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). He wrote his Mass in G minor (Curwen edition) after the First World War, at the same time as his Pastoral Symphony. Some believe that it is a way for Vaughan Williams to heal the world to write this beautiful music. Vokalensemblen Sundbyberg presents this new release pairing an internationally renowned composer's large a cappella work with the finest contemporary Swedish a cappella music. Vokalensemblen Sundbyberg (the Sundbyberg Vocal Ensemble) consists of music graduates, choral conductors and experienced choral singers. Central to it's music-making are the importance of breathing, good intonation and passion. The choir aims to promote the development of newly written Swedish choral music for the church by means of commissions and collaborations with composers, and also to increase people's familiarity with lesser-known works, not least those by Swedish composers.

The music on this 1997 two-CD set was originally on two LPs and already previously reissued as a pair of CDs. Guitarist Kenny Burrell leads a very coherent jam session in the studio with a particularly strong cast that also includes trumpeter Louis Smith, both Junior Cook and Tina Brooks on tenors, either Duke Jordan or Bobby Timmons on piano, bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Art Blakey. The material consists of basic originals and standards and has excellent playing all around; six of the nine tunes are over nine minutes long. At that point in time, Cook and Brooks had similar sounds, but, fortunately, the soloists are identified in the liner notes for each song.

With Volume 48 of our groundbreaking Romantic Piano Concerto series we reach very uncharted territory indeed. Sir Julius Benedict has been all but forgotten today but he is yet another composer who gives the lie to the idea that Britain was ‘a land without music’ in the nineteenth century. Though born in Germany, Benedict settled in London in 1835, having already established a career as composer and pianist on the continent.

Born in Jelenia Gura, Sulamita Slubowska started playing the violin at the age of six under the direction of Ludmila Solowiewicz. Graduate of the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice in the class of Prof. Szymon Krzeszowiec, in which she has been working as an assistant professor since 2020. Graduate of the NOSPR Academy. She has trained her skills under the guidance of outstanding artists, such as Pierre Amoyal, Gidon Kremer, Pinchas Zukerman, Roland Baldini, Bartlomiej Niziol and Maria Szwajger-Kulakowska. Moreover, she has been appreciated many times at national and international com- petitions, win-ning, among others, first place at International 'Young Paganini' Violin Competition in Legnica, first place at National Stanislaw Serwaczynski Competition of Young Violinists in Lublin, third place in the Michal SpisakNational Music Competition in Dabrowa Gornicza. On this release, she presents a program of works by Bacewicz, Prokofiev, and Part.

Vingt-Quatre Caprices en Forme d’Etudes pour le Violon seul dans les Vingt-Quatre Tons de la Gamme, i.e. 24 Caprices for Solo Violin by Pierre Rode, next to an analogous cycle by Niccolò Paganini, should be considered one of the most important violin works of early Romanticism. Rode’s compositions are advanced and innovative, and their contribution to the development of the 19th-century cycle of instrumental miniatures is undeniable.

Plastic Wood is a huge departure from the jangle rock albums that Lloyd Cole usually creates. Purely instrumental and recorded alone in New York and London in 1999 and 2000, the album is a startlingly beautiful collection of 18 ambient electronic songs. Cole's gentle, pastoral melodies are everywhere, but they're remarkably subtle and delicate here. Indeed, this is no noisy, experimental Aphex Twin wannabe at work. This is Cole operating in the hushed tones of Brian Eno's acclaimed ambient albums. One could easily confuse Plastic Wood with the work of ISAN or another of the acclaimed artists on the Morr Music label.

This was the first set of the Nine to be planned, recorded and sold as an integral cycle. It was also a set that had been extremely carefully positioned from the interpretative point of view. Where Karajan's 1950s Philharmonia cycle had elements in it that owed a certain amount to the old German school of Beethoven interpretation, the new-found virtuosity of the Berliners allowed him to approach more nearly the fierce beauty and lean-toned fiery m anner of Toscanini's Beethoven style as Karajan had first encountered it in its halcyon age in the mid-1930s.