The complete set of Vladimir Horowitz’s DG recordings in a single box, including Horowitz in Hamburg from 2008 and three bonus tracks only previously available on the compilation The Magic of Horowitz.

Nikolai Demidenko is a celebrated piano virtuoso, considered a leading exponent of the Russian school of playing. His blend of technical brilliance and musical vision have earned him consistent raves since he first emerged on the international scene in the mid-1980s, and he has become a musical fixture in his adopted home of Great Britain, where he gained citizenship in 1995. Demidenko began playing before the age of five, learning on his grandfather's old, beaten-up piano. By the age of six, he was a student of Anna Kantor (Evgeny Kissin's teacher) at the Gnessin School of Music. An obstinate student who disliked scales and technique, Demidenko still made swift progress, and he eventually entered the Moscow Conservatory. There, he studied with Dmitri Bashkirov, whom Demidenko credits with fostering his more individual qualities as a player, as well as ironing out the remaining wrinkles in his technique. Reaching the finals of both the 1976 Montreal competition and the 1978 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow (where he played through an acute case of the flu) served as a final springboard to professional recognition.

Occasionally—very occasionally—a record appears that is so exactly right in every particular that a reviewer just sits back and gives himself up to sheer enjoyment (though making a mental note to reserve a place for it among his choices for the year). This is one such: its combination of Scarlatti's inexhaustible and unpredictable invention with Trevor Pinnock's vitality and rhythmic energy must surely lift the spirits of even the most jaded listener. Pinnock never puts a finger wrong here, literally or figuratively: he captures the atmosphere of each sonata with complete understanding, responsive to all Scarlatti's little quirks, and conveying a feeling of whole-heartedly enjoying himself.

Domenico Scarlatti is almost exclusively associated with his 600 sonatas for keyboard. But, as with most composers of his time, he also contributed to other genres including music for instrumental ensemble and vocal music. In the early stages of his career, when he was still in Italy, he composed several operas. As there was a close connection between the opera and the chamber cantata it come as no surprise that his output includes several specimens of the latter genre, which was extremely popular throughout Europe.

With Night Passages Martin Fröst fuses a centuries-spanning selection of music, from the famous to the rare, into highly original arrangements for clarinet, bass and piano. With his unusual ensemble he touches the genre of jazz, folk and turns traditional Baroque favorites by Bach, Scarlatti, Handel and Rameau into original arrangements. He also sends greetings from his home country, Sweden, with music by Romantic composer Hugo Alfvén and the traditional Polska from Dorotea. Martin Fröst is widely recognized as an artist who constantly seeks new ways to shape, challenge and rebuild the classical music arena and, together with Miles Davis, the only wind soloist to have received one of the world's highest music honors; the Léonie Sonning Music Prize.

During his lifetime, from his Neapolitan years to his Spanish sojourn, Domenico Scarlatti cultivated the “cantata” genre, composing at least about sixty works – those of uncertain attribution and his Serenades excluded. Other cantatas are likely to emerge once the uncatalogued funds are systematically scanned. Since in those years the cantata was a genre on the wane, this high number is revealing of Scarlatti’s uninterrupted link with the baroque tradition, an age in which the cantata had reached its climax as an extremely refined genre, the place for daring experimentation, and exquisite writing, the appropriate gym for high craftsmanship, as expected by the elitist audience for which it was intended. The manuscripts date from 1699 to 1724.

Handel and Scarlatti together? Long ago, in Rome (for a musical joust before the most eminent cardinals), in Venice (at a masked ball where Scarlatti recognised the faceless harpsichordist: “It could be no one but the famous Saxon, or the devil”), in London (where an opera by Scarlatti was staged). Together again under the pen of Charles Burney, who celebrated them as the two supreme masters of the harpsichord, the ‘heavenly twins’. And together once more in the little church in Haarlem to which Pierre Hantaï returns like a pilgrim.

In the eighteenth century the cantata was considered to be the supreme challenge for a composer's artistry. Here are recorded three fine examples from the enormous corpus of such works by Alessandro Scarlatti, two for solo voice with continuo, and one which includes a particularly demanding part for obbligato trumpet, faultlessly played by Crispian Steele-Perkins.

Alessandro Scarlatti’s 600-plus cantatas make him one of the more prolific exponents of a form that flourished in Italy in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Though he’s generally credited with standardising cantata form, his early essays in the genre were often imaginatively varied, as is shown by the delectable Arcadian Academy disc. Rather than the usual two or three da capo arias alternating with recitatives, the four secular cantatas here boast opening sinfonias, closing ariosos, large numbers of movements and a range of aria-types. Bella madre dei fiori, for example, experiments with a mix of poetic strophes and instrumental ritornelli. Even so, this formal ingenuity would be of limited interest were it not for Scarlatti’s gifts for attractive melody and sensitive illustration of his texts.

This 10 CD set offers 11 live recitals given by 10 famous pianists in Switzerland from 1953 to 1993. Each pianist is credited by a single CD. Only Backhaus CD contains fragments from two different programs (1953 and 1960), all the other pianists are represented by a single program.

The biggest surprise on this wonderfully exuberant and exhilarating disc comes with the very first notes: the piano tone is rich and full, worlds away from the slightly distant, musical-box tone that is often thought appropriate for recordings of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas on a modern concert grand. But as the soundworld suggests, Tharaud is totally unapologetic about playing these pieces – all originally composed for harpsichord even though the earliest fortepianos were in circulation in Scarlatti's time – on a piano. In the sleevenotes, Tharaud says that of the four baroque keyboard composers that he has recorded so far – Bach, Couperin, Rameau and now Scarlatti – it's the last whose music is most suited to this treatment. His selection of sonatas is chosen for maximum variety, with a group in which the Spanish inflections of flamenco and folk music can be heard, others in which he gets a chance to show some dazzling technique, alongside those in which the playfulness is replaced by profound introspection.