Jonas Kaufmann is a German tenor who made his solo album debut in 2008 after establishing himself as an international opera superstar. Born on July 10, 1969, in Munich, Germany, he studied locally at the Musikhochschule and made his major performance debut nationally in Saarbrücken in 1994. In later years he would perform in some of the world's most prestigious theaters, including Covent Garden (London), Bastille Opera (Paris), La Scala (Milan), and Metropolitan Opera (New York).

When Grinderman released their debut in 2007, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, and Martyn Casey created a reckless, drunken animal of an alter ego to the Bad Seeds. The album bridged territory mined by everyone from the Stooges to Suicide to Bo Diddley. Again recorded in the company of producer Nick Launay, Grinderman 2 is a more polished and studied affair than its predecessor, but it's a more sonically adventurous, white-hot rock & roll record. The opening, "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man," comes closest to the songs on the previous album, but feels like it comes by way of Patti Smith's "Radio Ethiopia," Howlin' Wolf, and the Scientists. It's pure scummy, sleazy, in-the-red dissonant rock. The swampy, ribald blues of "Kitchenette," features Casey's bass roiling around distorted, Echoplexed electric guitar, electric bouzouki, and jungle-like tom-toms and kick drums. Cave does his best lecher-in-heat blues howl – if Charles Bukowski had sung the blues, this is what it would have sounded like.

The three sonatas Stephen Hough has selected for this recital not only reveal Johann Nepomuk Hummel as a plausible "missing link" between Beethoven and Chopin, but also as a formidable, creative force in his own right. Maybe he's not so memorable a melodist as Chopin nor a protean architect on the level of Beethoven, but Hummel's piano writing still sounds idiomatic and invigorating to modern ears. It's also quite difficult. The F-sharp minor sonata's dramatic finale, for instance, allows little respite from its unrelenting broken octaves, taxing runs, and double notes, while the gnarly dotted rhythms, imitative writing, and thick chords permeating the D major sonata's Scherzo evoke the Schumann to come. No matter how difficult the music, Stephen Hough's effortless technique and eloquent, characterful musicality make everything sound easy. What's more, he never sacrifices power for speed. Listen for example to the way he gives the challenging, spiraling triplets in the F minor sonata's finale their full dynamic due, maintaining a full, tonally varied sonority with virtually no help from the sustain pedal. In sum, it will take a heap of work and tons of inspiration for future pianists to match Hough's reference standards here. This is a valuable release and a joyous listening experience all in one: don't miss it.

This production of Mozart’s Zauberflöte received enormous and unanimous approval, when it was premiered in Salzburg. The Theatre wizard Jean-Pierre Ponnellecreated a staging which became part and parcel of the festival programme for over nine years and soon acquired the status of a legend. Of course, none of that would have had the same appeal if it had not been in accord with Mozart’s music, performed with perfect blend of lightness and pathos, humour and profundity, by James Levine and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; nor would it all have worked without a truly Festival-worthy cast of singers: the Finnish bass Martti Talvela, who departed way too soon in 1989, in his famous role as Sarastro, the incomparable Edita Gruberová as “the best-ever Queen of the Night” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), the legendary Tamino Peter Schreier as well as the petite, lyrical soprano Ileana Cotrubas˛ as Pamina. Further, Christian Boesch, who sang the role of his life with Papageno, was credited most for his performance in this legendary Zauberflöte.

Before the release of this disc called Ah! Mio cor!, charismatic mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozená had already made her mark as a Handel singer with her recordings of the composer's Italian cantatas and opera Julius Caesar, but this triumphant 2007 collection of arias affirms her mastery of the German-English composer's music. Featuring selections from the composer's operas and oratorios, this disc is more of a smorgasbord than a balanced meal with one highly expressive and supremely virtuosic aria following another and the only cohesion supplied by the performer.

Best known for his huge output of concertos for the violin, Antonio Vivaldi produced a sizeable number of concertos for other instruments including the cello, an instrument that was little used as a soloist during Vivaldi's time. In all, there are 27 extant cello concertos that, like the violin concertos, push the instrument's technical and expressive abilities.

Claudio Monteverdi's Seventh Book of Madrigals, written in 1619, was really the first that was fully part of the new operatic age – and really the first to consist of pieces that were not really madrigals at all. For all of the soloistic and operatic expressive devices, for all the block chords that had appeared in the previous few books, this was the first set in which Monteverdi dispensed with the traditional five-voice texture of the madrigal.

This is the debut album from the recently formed Russian-Finnish ensemble La Compangnie Pochette.” The group is made up of violinist Minna Pensola, violist Antti Tikkanen, and violin da spalls Segey Malov. For this release, they have chosen the Goldberg Variations, some of J. S. Bach’s most famous works. The three musicians have arranged the entire variations for their unique instrumentation, and this is the premiere recording of this arrangement.