Perlman's Four Seasons was recorded in 1976 in London's Abbey Road Studios. This was before the period instruments craze had gotten up to full steam. Perlman and the London Philharmonic play unrepentantly on modern instruments and in a modern style, albeit not without Baroque savvy. Expansive tempos and rich, vibrato-generous sonorities make this recording a good choice for listeners who don't seek the astringencies of period performance, or who simply want to take a musical bubble bath in this repertoire.

Named after the 12-sided ‘golden’ tower that dominates the River Guadalquivir in Seville, La Torre del Oro is the latest album from Christina Pluhar’s ensemble L’Arpeggiata. Pluhar is renowned for her ability to create innovative programmes that combine composed music with folk music – this album focuses on music from Spain, Central America and South America. La Torre del Oro features performances by singers Céline Scheen, Luciana Mancini and Vincenzo Capezzuto, with a variety of featured instruments including the baroque guitar and harp, Venezuelan cuatro and harp, cornetto, harpsichord, accordion and maracas. La Torre del Oro includes pieces by Spanish composers Alonso Mudarra, Diego Pisador, Lucas Ruiz de Ribayas and Santiago de Murcia, heard in context with the jácara, fandango, folía, canario and ciaccona and the Venezuelan joropo and pájarillo. The programme also features works by South American composers – namely, Reynaldo Armas, Simón Díaz, Ignacio « Indio » Figueredo, Agustín Rivas, Hilda Herrera and Violeta Para.

Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.

This fabulous five disc set is replete with some of those old Stokowski warhorses all recorded in absolutely mind boggling Phase 4 sound, overblown perhaps but astounding for its time. Decca's remastering is absolutely magnificent and the discs are jam packed with almost six hours of music. This is another fine memorial to a great conductor who remained astonishingly vital until the very end of his life.

This set brings together recordings of Italian music by Chiara Banchini and Amandine Beyer. It is symbolic of a filiation between the two artists, Amandine Beyer having succeeded Chiara Banchini as professor of Baroque violin at the Schola Cantorum in Basle, Switzerland. The release follows Amandine Beyer s recording of Bach s Sonatas for solo violin as well as Chiara Banchini s recording of his Sonatas for violin and keyboard, both of which received a Diapason d Or. The set includes the re-release of Vivaldi s Four Seasons by Amandine Beyer.

“These are performances in which tempos, phrasing, articulation and the execution of ornaments are convincing,” wrote Gramophone of Jarrett’s first recorded account of The Well-Tempered Clavier. “Both instrument and performer serve as unobtrusive media through which the music emerges without enhancement.” In this live recording from Troy, New York, made in March 1987, just one month after his studio recording of the work, Keith Jarrett addresses the challenges of Bach’s great set of preludes and fugues once more. Part of the goal is transparency, to bring the listener closer to the composer. As Jarrett explained at the time: “The very direction of the lines, the moving lines of notes, are inherently expressive…When I play Bach, I hear almost the process of thought. Any colouration has nothing to do with this process.“

This recording, 2026, represents a high-water mark for Baroque performance in the modern era. It brings together the Berliner Barock Solisten (the world-class early music ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic) and Daishin Kashimoto, the Berlin Philharmonic’s esteemed First Concertmaster.

This series of CDs by Tactus and Modo Antiquo represents the first complete recording of the cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi. Up until now, these works have appeared only sporadically on record, yet they constitute quite an important body of works in Vivaldi’s total production. Dedicated exclusively to female voices, the cantatas have here been divided according to the classifications used in the Ryom catalogue: cantatas for soprano and continuo, cantatas for contralto and continuo, cantatas for soprano and instruments, cantatas for contralto and instruments. Modo Antiquo has approached this first complete recording of the cantatas by Vivaldi with full respect for the original texts and the performance practices of the period.

Having already attracted attention for his exceptional gifts, Bach entered the service of the Weimar court at the age of twenty-three. This was the start of the period known as his ‘early maturity’, in which his formal and expressive experiments reflect a significant interest in French music and ‘la belle danse’. The close intertwining of French and German styles is the dominant feature of this third volume in Benjamin Alard’s recording of the complete organ and harpsichord works.

This truly international ensemble drawn from Japan, Germany and the USA discloses a Newly Planted Thuringian Pleasure Garden virtually unknown on disc. Johann Rudolf Able (1625-73) worked at St Blasius Church in Muhlhausen (a predecessor there of JS Bach), but his stylistic lineage is clearly from Venice and Gabrieli, via Schiitz. Into his ‘garden’ Ahle ‘transplanted… new spiritual musical plants with three to ten and more parts’. The selection here uses four lucid voices, a cornetto and four trombones, a pair of violins and continue organ.

Lavinia Meijer returns with the album "Unfolding Lines," out on April 10.⁠ A newly remastered edition of her album "1685," it highlights works by Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti.⁠

In this second instalment of complete keyboard works, Benjamin Alard demonstrates with splendid eloquence how invaluable the young Bach’s north German experience proved to be; his attentive examination of the works of the great organ masters and his craving for all kinds of music significantly broadened the stylistic foundations of his keyboard writing. The wide range of works presented here, complemented by pieces by Buxtehude, Reinken and Pachelbel, illustrates in exemplary fashion the power of a master in the making.

The fact that Johann Sebastian Bach was able to take up the post of Thomaskantor in 1723 was thanks to the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. He refused to allow his court conductor Christoph Graupner to move to Leipzig, declared the appointment of the local magistrate null and void, increased the salary of his subordinate and was thus able to enjoy the versatility of the man, who achieved outstanding things in all areas of musical art at the time, for a long time to come. In orchestral music, for example, he sought unusual effects with unusual experiments by combining seemingly disparate instruments with one another and also knew no restrictions worth mentioning in formal terms. Would he have been just as successful with the dignified councillors on the Pleibe as he was under the aegis of his aristocratic employer? By the end of this 2 1 / 2-hour selection at the latest, we must thank His Serene Highness for not letting Graupner go three hundred years ago.