The development of an original classical repertoire for the accordion began with Mogens Ellegaard in his native Denmark and his student, the Scot Owen Murray, in the UK. In 1976 Ellegaard gave the first broadcast performance of Gordon Jacob's pastoral, elegant concerto, which treats the accordion almost as a chamber organ. A generation and more later, two concertos written for Owen Murray open out the possibilities of the accordion much more adventurously, exploiting it's extraordinary range of colour, it's striking range of expression and it's mercurial ability to weave through orchestral textures.

Charles Villiers Stanford felt a special affinity for the orchestral song, an idiom which began to establish itself as a distinct art form in it's own right at the end of the nineteenth century with composers such as Mahler, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Bantock. This recording, released to mark the composer's centenary year, features a wide selection of colourful and inventive orchestrations he made of his own songs and arrangements of Irish folk melodies for the concert hall, many of which were made for the leading soloists of the days such as Harry Plunket Greene, David Bispham, Marie Brema and Olga Michailoff (the wife of Henry Wood).

This ballet in 2 acts and 6 scenes was created by George Balanchine to music by Mendelssohn based on a story by Shakespeare. The Pacific Northwest Ballet performs with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Cynthia Fleming, Libby Crabtree, and Judith Harris.