It is an important moment in the life of a singer when she is able to confront the standard repertory. After years spent studying theatre and music in Shakespeare’s England under the guidance of musicologist Philip Brett, Jill Feldman recorded two programmes of Henry Purcell’s music in 1992, reissued here as a double CD.

August 18th marks the 100th anniversary of th e 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting women in the US the right to vote. A fitting time then for our release of the World Premier Recording of Ethel Smyths late masterpiece The Prison. Smyth left home at nineteen to study composition in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvoák, and Grieg. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Met, in 1903.

In Jepht by Michel Pignolet de Montclair, Gyrgy Vashegyi directs with style and energy another riveting account of a neglected French Baroque opera. The work, based on the Biblical tale of a conquering general obliged, by a sacred vow, to sacrifice his own kin, became an immediate success in 1732, indeed a fixture in opera life in France, receiving over a hundred performances at the Opra alone in the three decades following its premire. Montclair and his librettist Pellegrin were open to preparing revised versions of the opera and it is the third and conclusive edition which has been worked on by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and recorded by Vashegyi and his musicians.

Handel's arrival in Rome seems to have had a miraculous influence on his development as a composer. Something about the eternal city ignited the most productive period of his entire career: there Handel worked with some of the greatest musicians of the age and enjoyed the favours of major patrons of the arts. There he also witnessed the clerical aristocracy's sensual enjoyment of those very luxuries, excesses, and trappings of beauty that they professed to deny in their sermons. In Handel in Rome, Dunedin Consort and its director John Butt set out to convey Handel's response to this stimulating and somewhat paradoxical environment with three Italian cantatas. Winner of the Rising Talent award at the 2022 International Opera Awards, Nardus Williams is the star soprano.

Paatos is a Swedish progressive rock band that was formed in 2000 by Reine Fiske (followed up by Peter Nylander), and Stefan Dimle (both previous members of Landberk and current members of Morte Macabre), Petronella Nettermalm, Ricard Nettermalm (Puckspony) and Johan Wallen. The band has many influences. The sum of Sigur Ros, Bjork, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Can, early Bowie, and many more, plus the inevitable affect of the Swedish constant state of melancholy and lack of sun during a better part of the year, creates its own voice. The five members of Paatos have varied musical backgrounds which they bring into the studio and rehearsals when the music is composed. The beauty is that this creates music that none of the members could accomplish on their own, as well as being a very unifying process for the band…