Tomas Breton's La Dolores from 1895–in which all the male characters love the heroine, Dolores, who works in an inn–is an opera espagnola: a full-blown opera, not a zarzuela, and its plot, characters, mood, and music could belong to no other country but Spain. Breton's musical idiom is late romantic, and he's a fine composer. The opera's acts build with good intensity, and throughout he keeps the local flavor alive with dances and rhythms that are peculiarly Spanish.

Béatrice et Bénédict, Berlioz's last completed work, is based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, but the libretto, by the composer, dispenses with most of the intrigue of the original and reduces the plot to a single premise: Béatrice et Bénédict mask their affection for each other by squabbling, and then finally come to their senses and get married. Although designated an opera, it is closer in effect to an opéra comique because of its very extensive use of spoken dialogue.

Conductor and pianist James Levine is one of the powerhouse figures of the classical music scene today. As a child he undertook both piano and violin; he was so accomplished on the violin that at the age of ten he played Mendelssohn's second violin concerto at a Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra youth concert. He studied piano at various summer music festivals before enrolling at New York's Juilliard School, where he took conducting courses with Jean Morel and continued piano studies with Rosina Lhevinne.

Bruckner's early string quartet is more a composition exercise than a full-fledged work of art, but the quintet is something else entirely: a chamber music masterpiece to rank with the great symphonies in expressive intensity and sheer musical grandeur. Indeed, there are a few places where Bruckner seems to demand an almost orchestral volume of tone, and the slow movement has been successful performed (and recorded) by a full string orchestra. The Intermezzo is none other than an alternative scherzo for the quintet, composed because the original players at the premier found Bruckner's first thoughts too difficult. Well, the members of L'Archibudelli certainly don't find the music too difficult–you won't find better performances anywhere.

For twenty years the Berliner Philharmoniker has celebrated its 1882 founding with a concert at a major European venue, and the 2011 event takes place at the magnificent Teatro Real in Madrid. The renowned orchestra, under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, performs Joaquín Rodrigo’s beloved Concierto de Aranjuez, Emmanuel Chabrier’s exuberant España, and Sergey Rachmaninov’s dramatic Second Symphony. It is joined for the Concierto by the famous flamenco guitarist Cañizares, whose virtuosity and sensitivity are given full opportunity to shine in this multi-faceted and subtle work.

The Elbphilharmonie, the “hall of wonders” (The Guardian), is undoubtedly the new landmark of Hamburg, a monumental synthesis of breath-taking architecture, a unique location and a world-class concert hall. In varying instrumentation the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under the baton of Principal Conductor Thomas Hengelbrock and several top-class soloists explores in the opening concert the possibilities of the Elbphilharmonie’s Grand Hall and ist acoustics with an exciting programme that spans across all musical eras, from the Renaissance to the present. It culminates in a brand-new commissioned work, created especially for this occasion by the most important living German composer, Wolfgang Rihm.

Deutsche Messe (German Mass), D 872, is a mass composed by Franz Schubert in 1827. Its text is not the Latin liturgical text, but a sequence of poems in German by Johann Philipp Neumann who commissioned the work. It was originally scored for SATB choir, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 3 trombones, timpani and basso continuo. It is also known as the Gesänge zur Feier des heiligen Opfers der Messe ("Songs for the celebration of the holy offering of the Mass"), and the "Wind Mass" due to its orchestration of primarily wind instruments.

If you'd like to access the full scope of Alkan's quirky style in bite-sized proportions rather than piling into the Concerto for Solo Piano, Les Quartre Ages, and other large-scale concoctions, here's a disc for you. Esquisses (Sketches) contains 49 piano miniatures, each lasting from 43 seconds to a little more than four minutes. Alkan apparently composed these over a 15-year span. He eventually partitioned the collection into four volumes, arranged according to key sequence.

“IVANHOE is a romantic opera in three acts based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott, with music by Sir Arthur Sullivan and a libretto by Julian Sturgis. It premiered at the Royal English Opera House on 31 January 1891 for a consecutive run of 155 performances, unheard of for a grand opera. Later that year it was performed six more times, making a total of 161 performances.

This profound, yet still often light-hearted, E flat Trio was written in the same month (November) that Schubert completed Winterreise. We are instantly reminded of this in the Florestan's eloquent and aptly paced account of the C minor Andante con moto, with what Richard Wigmore describes as its 'stoical trudging gait'.

It is good to have this uninhibitedly tuneful setting of the mass back in the catalogue, particularly in this warm and energetic Parisian performance. Gounod here in almost every section presents melodies that to us today have a hint of hit tunes, particularly the brash theme that underpins the "Credo" (which later returns Cut La forza) and the deliciously inappropriate tune for "Agnus Dei". The fact that vulgarity is only just avoided somehow adds to the attractions, and certainly no Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast should miss hearing the work. The performance is even more enjoyable than I had remembered with excellent work from the soloists as well as the choir.

(Edward Greenfield, Gramophone)

Director Roman Polanski's film The Pianist is based on the memoirs of Polish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman about his harrowing experiences under the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II. The soundtrack album consists almost entirely of Chopin piano pieces, most of them played by Janusz Olejniczak. Most of those, in turn, are solo performances, although Olejniczak is joined by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Tadeusz Strugala, for Grand Polonaise for Piano and Orchestra. The sole non-Chopin track is the excerpt from Wojciech Kilar's score, "Moving to the Ghetto October 31, 1940," a klezmer-like piece running only 1:45 in which Hanna Wolczedska plays clarinet, accompanied by the Warsaw Philharmonic. Appropriately, the album ends with an actual recording by Szpilman of the Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17, No. 4.

Les vêpres siciliennes, like the similarly epic Don Carlos, was conceived as a grand opéra for Paris and is driven by the tensions between private passions and public politics. Originally set during Sicily’s 13th-century uprising against French rule, in Christof Loy’s staging for the Netherlands Opera the action is transposed to a 1940s world of sudden violence and shadowy double-dealing. Imaginatively cast and idiomatically conducted, the performance presents this magnificent score in its entirety, including the allegorical ballet The Four Seasons.

Alexander Anissimov’s 1997 Naxos one with National Symphony Orchestra and RTÉ Philharmonic Choir…Helen Field, singing for Anissimov, is a real delight in the slow movement, poignant, lyrical and clear in enunciation in a performance that has two fine Russians (tenor Ivan Choupenitch and baritone Oleg Melnikov) as the other soloists and an approach to the score that transmits a broad, well honed spectrum of emotion.

(Gramophone)

Recordings of Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, are abundant, and even the pairing with the rarer Robert Schumann Violin Concerto, WoO 23, of 1853 are not as infrequent as they used to be. The thorny Schumann concerto has undergone a reevaluation upward, and plenty of players now concur with the judgment of Yehudi Menuhin: "This concerto is the historically missing link of the violin literature; it is the bridge between the Beethoven and the Brahms concertos, though leaning more towards Brahms." Violinist Carolin Widmann who (like the ECM label on which the album appears) has focused mostly on contemporary music, takes up the challenge of providing something new here, and she meets it. The central fact of the recording is that Widmann conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Europe from the violin. Others have done this before, but few have pursued the implications of the technique as far as Widmann has: the performances are unusually light and transparent, and they are perhaps thus in accord with the sounds an orchestra of the middle 19th century might have produced. Sample the unusually lively, sprightly reading of the Mendelssohn concerto's finale.