Maurice Ravel’s piano trio was the result of an earlier war insinuating itself into his composition. The work’s first movements, however, were conceived as far from war as imaginable. Early summer 1914 found Ravel at his happiest, holidaying with Alexandre Benois in the Basque town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the Atlantic coast half a mile from Ravel’s birthplace of Ciboure.

The largest collection of piano nocturnes on CD, celebrating the art of the romantic piano song without words. Over a century of repertoire in all modern recordings, plus a new booklet essay exploring the history and context of the nocturne.

Previously, soprano Fatma Said’s latest albums, El Nour and Kaleidoscope crossed cultures and musical genres, her new album Lieder instead focuses on German-language songs of the Romantic era: lieder by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.

The fact that Timothy Ridout has recorded a whole album of music for unaccompanied viola before the age of thirty is a telling indication of the meteoric rise of this prodigious, boundary-pushing artist. As is his choice of contrasting the Baroque era (Telemann and Bach) with two figures of modern music, in Britten's rarely heard Elegy and Caroline Shaw's in manus tuas. This program is a breathtaking ode to the viola over the centuries, played with all the fire of youth.