Stephen Paulus was an astonishingly prolific fixture of the American music scene, with some 600 works to his credit. His sudden death in 2014 left classical music—particularly the worlds of opera and choral music—significantly the poorer, so it’s inevitable that we should see his legacy memorialised with new additions to the catalogue. Royal Holloway’s ‘Calm on the Listening Ear of Night’ sets Paulus’s music in dialogue with another Midwestern composer, René Clausen. It’s Clausen whose musical personality emerges most strongly here in these precise performances. His works offer a distinctively American spin on the fashionable Baltic sound world of Ešenvalds and Vasks that is as appealing as it is generous. In pace, which opens the disc, offers eight minutes of lushly filmic excess.

Hymn is the twelfth studio album by English soprano Sarah Brightman and first since 2013's Dreamchaser. The five-year gap between both studio albums marks Brightman's longest break between studio releases. This album marks Brightman's ninth studio collaboration with producer Frank Peterson. The album was released on 9 November 2018, entering at No. 1 on both the Billboard Classical Crossover Albums and overall Classical Albums, making Brightman the female artist with the most No. 1s in both charts.

So You … (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) is a major new work by legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. It is an hour-long epic that tracks the familiar Orpheus myth from a less familiar perspective: that of Eurydice as imagined by poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle); a Eurydice who rails at Orpheus for his hubris in attempting to rescue her. So You … (Hermes, Orpheus, Eurydice) was originally commissioned by Documenta 14 and first performed as part of Documenta in Athens in 2017.

An album the majority of whose contents consists of harp arrangements of music by Philip Glass might seem a bit arcane for a major label, but it seems that Sony knows what it is doing here. The Glass Effect double album is one of those releases that succeed on two different levels, an explicit one and one that, although not mentioned, is perhaps even more important. The former level here is the one denoted by the title, as Meijer picks up the rather neglected theme of Philip Glass' influence by offering, on disc two, a group of works by younger composers who follow Glass in varying degrees but who, it's safe to say, wouldn't have the styles they do without Glass having gone before. Much of the album consists of arrangements by Meijer herself, and these include, at the end, a remix of music from Koyaanisqatsi that's delightful and would be spoiled by description. But there's also solo harp music: sample the Suite for Harp by progressive rock musician Bryce Dessner, who certainly seems to have absorbed Glass' style far enough to make it his own.

André Rieu, AKA ‘The King of the Waltz’, is raising women’s heartbeats with his new album ‘Romantic Moments II’ – to be released on 7 December. ‘Romantic Moments II’ features beautiful evergreen melodies, hits from the world’s famous movies, ballads and classical songs that have touched the hearts of millions for centuries. Romantic classics on the album range from ‘Strangers in the Night’, 'Sunrise, Sunset', ‘The Way Old Friends Do’ and ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady’ to traditional songs like ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘El cóndor pasa’, classical melodies like the ‘Vilja Song’, beloved waltzes like ‘By the Beautiful Blue Danube’ as well as music from films like ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ or ‘The Sound of Music’.

Two decades ago, APOCALYPTICA's first and most important album, "Plays Metallica By Four Cellos", was released, selling over 1.5 million copies to date and leading to a carefully remastered, critically acclaimed new album version with three bonus tracks in 2016.

The longing to overcome human boundaries led the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to begin an experiment that formed a threat to the whole of humanity, and whose scientific results still do today. The question of the moral implications of the atomic bomb is raised in John Adams’ opera, just as much as that of the influence on the private lives of the main characters. Doctor Atomic is the fifth work to result from almost twenty years of collaboration between the American composer and his fellow American director and Erasmus Prize-winner Peter Sellars.

This recording of works for violin and piano/orchestra by Krzysztof Penderecki marks and celebrates the long and fruitful cooperation and friendship between Anne-Sophie Mutter and Krzysztof Penderecki on the occasion of his 85th birthday on 23 November 2018.

We have been planing this unique project for a long time: a composition for two bass clarinets as a full evening program. Through intense research Pierluigi Billone has acquired much experience in handling the bass clarinet and is the ideal composer for this task. Billone has an open mind and original thoughts about such a project. His formal conception can open new spaces for the listeners and take them on a exciting journey into the souls of the bass clarinets. The title of the work 1+1=1 is a quotation from an Andrey Tarkovskij film which points to the special relation between the two instruments.

A Family Christmas is filled with the diverse components that have typified the "TPG Twist" fun, irreverent combinations that people find refreshing. The album features new takes on Christmas classics such as "Let it Snow," "Winter Wonderland" and "Silent Night," as well as two original compositions from Jon Schmidt and Steven Sharp Nelson. And, for the first time since their breakthrough video of "What Makes You Beautiful," all four of The Piano Guys perform together for a remarkable version of "Angels We Have Heard on High," which will be supported by a new YouTube video. Says Schmidt, "We spent a lot of time crafting the album so that there's something for everybody. It's an opportunity to jam and dance around the house while decorating the tree as well as the chance to sit back with somebody you love and look at the fireplace."

There's perhaps a touch of irony in the title of Dutch pianist and composer Jeroen van Veen's box set Minimal Piano Collection because at nine discs, it's a pretty massive collection. The program booklet notes that he recorded the entire set, which includes more than ten hours of music, in only six days, an astounding feat. In the program notes, van Veen offers a remarkably clear and concise history of minimalism in music. He defines it broadly enough (following the lead of composer and critic Tom Johnson) to include works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Satie. Philip Glass is the composer most widely represented, with three of the set's nine CDs devoted to his music originally for piano, as well as transcriptions from his film scores and operas. Two discs are given to van Veen's mammoth 24 Préludes, organized according to the framework of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Other composers range from the very well known, such as Michael Nyman, John Adams, Terry Riley, Arvo Pärt, and John Cage, to the familiar-to-specialists, like Tom Johnson, Wim Mertens, and Jacob ter Veldhuis, to those little-known to American audiences, like Klaas de Vries, Simeon ten Holt, John Borstlap, Yann Tiersen, and Carlos Micháns.

Resonus is proud to present a programme of all world premiere recordings of chamber music by the contemporary British composer Tom Armstrong. Featuring an impressive and varied line-up of performers, this unique programme explores compositions that have been re-worked or revised for different purposes, with different degrees of adjustments, both minor and major, that can completely transform the way an earlier work sounds.

Contact is the third and final part of Flemish musician and composer Guy Van Nueten's piano trilogy 'Pacman". With Contact, Van Nueten has come up with his most mature work to date. Through recording his compositions in one take he allowed for a unity of time and space. This is a reaction against the frequent cutting and processing that takes place during recordings, whereby original emotions become diluted and the distance between music and listener increases. "I don't know what happened with me," says Van Nueten, "but with this record I've delved deep. I raised the bar higher than ever. This is the crowning glory."

The style in which the Finnish composer Sebastian Fagerlund composes might be described as ‘magic realism’, combining elements of surrealism with factual narrative. Drawing upon the symphony orchestra’s full spectrum of colours, the music reflects not only the traditions of impressionism, modernism and post-minimalism but also reveals the composer’s acute ear for other genres, from cool jazz to ambient music. An earlier recording of orchestral works by Sebastian Fagerlund was described in BBC Music Magazine as displaying 'boundless technical resource at the service of a considerable imagination'. These qualities, and his receptivity towards different musical traditions Fagerlund shares with Pekka Kuusisto, to whom the violin concerto Darkness in Light is dedicated. The title of the work is a subtle reference to a quote from author Haruki Murakami’s novella Firefly: ‘Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it’. The disc closes with the orchestral work Ignite, composed for and performed here by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, under its chief conductor Hannu Lintu.

Thierry Lancino’s background includes extensive periods of research at IRCAM and elsewhere, but his recent work concentrates on a lyrical and bold freedom of style embracing ideas of both seduction and spirituality. Inspired by a scene of historical impact, his Prelude and Death of Virgil dramatizes the demise of a daunting genius.