For the middle decades of the twentieth century Cedric Thorpe Davie (1913-83) was a mainstay of musical life in Britain - and in Scotland in particular - as an administrator, academic, choral director and, especially, composer. His many film scores brought him a wide audience, but the orchestral works he wrote for the concert hall are as good as unknown. The five works heard here, all in their first recordings, reveal craftsmanship of a high order and a natural melodic gift, in a style anchored in the soundworlds of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams - both of whom he knew personally - combined with a Scottish accent that gives this music a unique personal voice.

Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) occupies an important place in early twentieth-century European music. Born in Liege, he demonstrated exceptional musical talent from a young age and studied at the Royal Conservatory of Liege, where he excelled in composition, organ, and piano. Jongen was deeply influenced by the French musical tradition, particularly the harmonic language of Cesar Franck, Gabriel Faure, and Claude Debussy, while retaining a distinctive personal voice. Jongen's piano works reveal a composer of remarkable craftsmanship and lyrical imagination. Rather than pursuing the dramatic intensity associated with late Romantic virtuosity, he favored elegance, clarity, and expressive subtlety. His music often combines flowing melodic lines with rich yet transparent harmonic textures, creating an atmosphere of warmth and sophistication. Impressionistic harmonic colors frequently appear, though they are balanced by classical formal structures and careful contrapuntal writing. Rhythmically, Jongen's piano compositions display flexibility and natural phrasing, avoiding excessive complexity while maintaining a refined sense of momentum. His writing is idiomatic for the instrument, demonstrating an intimate understanding of the piano's expressive possibilities without relying on technical display for it's own sake. Many of his works evoke poetic imagery through delicate textures, nuanced dynamics, and refined pedaling. Riccardo Mussato, born in Italy in 1998, graduated with highest honours in Piano Performance at the Conservatoire of Turin, where he also obtained a Master cum laude and special mention. After some masterclasses in France, he completed a Master at the Conservatoire Royal of Bruxelles with Distinction and he is ending a Master's degree program in Musicology at the University of Bologna. Particularly interested in French music, para-religious music, Italian music of 20th and 21st century, Mozart's opera, and Wagnerian drama, he maintains an active concert and outreach career, particularly through interdisciplinary lecture-recitals connecting music with the humanities.

Many composers who wrote primarily for the English cathedral tradition have not had the recognition they deserve outside that cloistered world. Tony Hewitt-Jones (1926-89) is one such. Although the choral and organ works heard on this album naturally respond to the requirements of the performers for whom he was writing, they have a freshness, energy and individuality that transcend their origin, their sound-world overlapping with that of some of his close contemporaries, like John Gardner, Kenneth Leighton and William Mathias.

A consort of violins makes it's way through the Venetian night beneath the arcades of St Mark's Square. From the basilica to aristocratic salons, from the streets to the taverns, the violinists follow the rhythms of daily life; the violin, a relatively new instrument, gradually found it's place within 16th century musical life. Moving through the places where music permeated the city of the Doges, Sulla Piazza paints a vivid musical fresco that provides an accompaniment to prayer as well as dancing until daybreak.

With their new release, the VocaMe vocal ensemble explores a unique chapter in medieval cultural history: the previously unrecorded works of the 13th-century Beguine mystic Hadewijch of Brabant. In close collaboration with Belgian scholars, they have created a program that impressively combines historical research with artistic imagination. Hadewijch's Old Flemish texts and songs are surprisingly sensual; the ceaseless quest for courtly love is reflected in nature, in spring and in the movement of the stars. The music ranges from calm and melancholic to lively and stirring, and even rhythmically accentuated. The vocal ensemble is accompanied by a selection of medieval instruments. This album is more than a musical realization - it is a poetic reimagining of one of the most compelling voices of medieval Europe. Hadewijch's vision of Minne emerges not as an abstract idea, but as a deeply human experience: sensual, searching, and timeless.

Bebop Riddle V is by turns sprightly, spry, energetic, and spirited. In this work, Thomas crafted animated, travelling, flexible, versatile, changing, fluid, and buoyant sonic adventures, a bit like two hummingbirds darting around a field of wildflowers. Iridescent, bold, and scintillating, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials of Bebop Riddle V are agile and vivacious, and their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed - variously whimsical, jazzy and bebop-like, layered, and reverberating, with lyrical resonance, pirouettes, fulcrum points, and vitality. The two equally virtuosic parts - requiring highly characterized dynamics and articulations, as well as fast fingering changes - sparkle forth for 8 minutes, unfolding fourteen continuously developing phrases, each lasting between 15 and 50 seconds. The music is organic and concerned with transformations and connections at every level. Poetically speaking, this composition has a kind of fractal quality to it - each part has a similar flair, twirl, whirl, pivot, and character as the whole. There are seven additional alternative instrumentation versions for Bebop Riddle V which can be purchased separately.

1621 was the year in which one of the most influential composers of Europe passed away - Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (15611621). With his knowledge and artistry, he had inspired an entire generation of musicians. Also in this year one of his students - Samuel Scheidt (15871654) - achieved public success as a composer by publishing Ludi musici, a collection of entertaining dance movements and canzonas. The recorder ensemble AS TIME GOES BY - A New Consort of Music from Vienna presents this music in a very exiting and insightful interpretation, which brings the nuances and details of these unknown compositions to light.

Schattenspiele brings together several facets of Gebhard Ullmann's remarkable creative world, blurring the boundaries between composition and improvisation, structure and spontaneity. Developed over many years, these works reflect an artistic journey of constant reinvention, where musical ideas evolve through performance, reflection and collaboration. From the atmospheric Kleine Symphonie with Berlin's adventurous LUX: NM ensemble to the vibrant colours of Hell und Bunt for the Aduma Saxophone Quartet and the deeply personal solo bass clarinet works, the album reveals Ullmann's unmistakable voice: lyrical, adventurous and endlessly imaginative. The recording captures this music with exceptional intimacy and clarity. The ensemble works were recorded at Berlin's renowned Bonello Studio, where performances were preserved almost entirely live, retaining their organic energy and immediacy. The solo works and saxophone quartet were recorded at Guy Sternberg's celebrated Low Swing Studio, centred around it's lovingly restored vintage Neve console, whose warm, transparent sound perfectly complements the expressive depth and rich sonic palette of Ullmann's bass clarinet and chamber music. Together, these extraordinary recording spaces help bring every nuance of Schattenspiele vividly to life!

A journey through time to castles, chambers and amorous settings around 1800. The irresistible soprano Shira Patchornik is a rising star on opera and concert stages. Many people are still familiar with Mozart's "Figaro". 'Al Desio di chi t'adora'. It is a song full of erotic tension addressed to her lover. And perhaps some are still familiar with Haydn's 'La vera Constanza'. The rest of this stimulating programme consists of discoveries and treasures from Italian opera of the same period, but largely forgotten. But what is it about? No opera can do without them: the maid, the lover, the chambermaid, the jealous wife, the daughter. Operas around 1800 are mostly intricate tales of intrigue and love. Sometimes dramatic, sometimes humorous, these stories inspired composers to the highest form of their art. Bella Ragazze, they become witnesses to amorous adventures, they are the projection screen for powerful men, or they themselves become energetic and vengeful protagonists. Shira Patchornik is a shooting star on the big stages and brings us key moments from opera treasures with a stupendous stage presence. She embodies characters in her own unique way and does justice to even the most breakneck coloratura. As if made for it, Mozart's rarely heard Divertimento joins the entertaining opera action: written as music for entertaining festive gatherings, it displays Mozart's characteristic humour in almost every moment.

Bebop Riddle V is by turns sprightly, spry, energetic, and spirited. In this work, Thomas crafted animated, travelling, flexible, versatile, changing, fluid, and buoyant sonic adventures, a bit like two hummingbirds darting around a field of wildflowers. Iridescent, bold, and scintillating, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials of Bebop Riddle V are agile and vivacious, and their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed - variously whimsical, jazzy and bebop-like, layered, and reverberating, with lyrical resonance, pirouettes, fulcrum points, and vitality. The two equally virtuosic parts - requiring highly characterized dynamics and articulations, as well as fast fingering changes - sparkle forth for 8 minutes, unfolding fourteen continuously developing phrases, each lasting between 15 and 50 seconds. The music is organic and concerned with transformations and connections at every level. Poetically speaking, this composition has a kind of fractal quality to it - each part has a similar flair, twirl, whirl, pivot, and character as the whole. There are seven additional alternative instrumentation versions for Bebop Riddle V which can be purchased separately.

Bebop Riddle V is by turns sprightly, spry, energetic, and spirited. In this work, Thomas crafted animated, travelling, flexible, versatile, changing, fluid, and buoyant sonic adventures, a bit like two hummingbirds darting around a field of wildflowers. Iridescent, bold, and scintillating, the carefully sculpted and fashioned musical materials of Bebop Riddle V are agile and vivacious, and their flexibility allows pathways to braid harmonic, rhythmic, and contrapuntal elements that are constantly transformed - variously whimsical, jazzy and bebop-like, layered, and reverberating, with lyrical resonance, pirouettes, fulcrum points, and vitality. The two equally virtuosic parts - requiring highly characterized dynamics and articulations, as well as fast fingering changes - sparkle forth for 8 minutes, unfolding fourteen continuously developing phrases, each lasting between 15 and 50 seconds. The music is organic and concerned with transformations and connections at every level. Poetically speaking, this composition has a kind of fractal quality to it - each part has a similar flair, twirl, whirl, pivot, and character as the whole. There are seven additional alternative instrumentation versions for Bebop Riddle V which can be purchased separately.

Frederic Rzewski - A Mensch The title of this album refers to the Yiddish word Mensch: literally 'a human being,' but in everyday use someone who acts with integrity, awareness and responsibility. For Frederic Rzewski, the term carried exactly this meaning. A Mensch is not a perfect person, but someone who remains fully human-capable of doubt, contradiction and critical thought, and resistant to becoming passive within larger societal systems. This idea runs quietly but consistently through his work. The pieces brought together here span more than sixty years, from the early 1950s to the last decade of his life, forming a kind of timeline across his career. The musical language changes, sometimes radically, but the underlying concerns remain strikingly constant. Rzewski's music engages with literature, politics and history, often through concrete situations-prison, injustice, personal crisis-but never in an abstract or detached way. The question is always how individuals relate to these forces, and whether they can remain human within them. In that sense, the ethical dimension of the Yiddish Mensch is not just a title, but something that can be heard throughout the programme. Taken as a whole, this recording traces a composer who never gave up on the idea that music can carry meaning beyond itself. Across decades of work, his voice remains clear in it's insistence that art can still ask what it means to live-and to act-as a human being.

Rex regum - An Imperial Christmas recreates one of the most remarkable Christmas celebrations of the Renaissance: the festive Mass celebrated in 's-Hertogenbosch on Christmas Day 1545, attended by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V during an unexpected stay in the city. Centered around Jheronimus Vinders' magnificent Missa Fit porta Christi pervia, the programme weaves together plainsong, Renaissance polyphony, traditional Dutch Christmas songs and organ music to evoke the rich soundscape of a sixteenth-century Christmas liturgy. As the final volume in Cappella Pratensis' acclaimed Den Bosch Choirbooks series, this recording brings centuries-old musical treasures from one of Europe's most important surviving choirbook collections vividly back to life through historically informed performance and meticulous scholarship. Adding to the recording's extraordinary authenticity is the use of the Van Straten organ at Amsterdam's Orgelpark an exact reconstruction of the celebrated 1479 organ from Utrecht's Nicolaikerk, whose sound world closely reflects that of the late Middle Ages. Combined with the ensemble's immersive performance practice, singing directly from original choirbook notation, the result is an inspiring musical journey that transports the listener into the splendour, devotion and ceremonial grandeur of an imperial Christmas more than 480 years ago.  The ensemble regularly has received a Diapason d'Or, the Prix Choc, and for the last three CDs, three consecutive Gramophone Editor's Choice's. In 2022 Capella Pratensis received a Gramophone Award, maybe the most important award one can receive in classical music!

With The Length Between Dusk and Dawn in Minutes, Swedish pianist and composer Matti Bye presents a deeply atmospheric album between ambient piano, modern classical music and cinematic minimalism. Across twelve intimate movements, Bye explores the fragile space between night and morning, where silence, memory and emotion slowly unfold. Delicate piano motifs, subtle harmonies and organic textures create a poetic sound world that feels both timeless and immediate. Melancholic, tender and quietly immersive, the album invites listeners into a suspended moment of reflection - a musical twilight shaped by sensitivity, restraint and emotional depth.

Kotaro Fukuma presents a magnificent collection of piano transcriptions combining virtuosity and lyricism. In addition to popular plays such as Bach-Gounod's Ave Maria, Schumann-Liszt's Widmung and Wagner-Liszt's Liebestod Isolde, the program includes Fukuma's own transcript of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik and a potpourri of French songs, "Chanson Medley". by his admirers.

Wagner defined Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the most complete work that he had ever created. The Bayreuth Festival 2025 presents the comedy in a new production staged by Matthias Davids, whose playful irreverence stands between tradition and renewal. Under the exceptional baton of Daniele Gatti, who debuted in Bayreuth in 2008 with Parsifal, the cast showcases it's brilliance and finesse. Georg Zeppenfeld, at the core of the performance, interprets Hans Sachs with excellent vocal skills and particular sensibility. Equally remarkable performances are given by Michael Spyres and Christina Nilsson, respectively, as Walther and Eva, and by Michael Nagy as a finely drawn Beckmesser. The result is a compelling piece of music theatre: 'A comedy of manners where themes of art, tradition and human love arise naturally.' (Seen and Heard International) Michael Spyres 'has everything a Stolzing needs: he is effortlessly present, sounds light yet embodied in the upper register, a German knight with italianità.' (BR-KLASSIK)

Alessandro Scarlatti's Il Trionfo della Grazia was first performed in Rome in 1685 and was such a huge success that the oratorio was regularly revived over a period of more than twenty years. Three manuscripts of it exist, one each in Rome, Modena, and Dresden. The score is remarkably inventive and profound for a 25-year-old composer; Scarlatti continued to alter and adjust it over the years. Here Ensemble Celadon focuses on the first Roman version of the work and does not include any later additions; the result is a lively and spirited work with an acute dramatic sense, thanks to which each performer can fully display their talents.

With a sublime cast and the revolutionary staging by Ulrich Rasche, this Salzburg Festival production of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda transforms a bel canto masterpiece into an evening of theatre. The conflict between Maria and Elisabetta becomes tangible through contrasting costumes, a constantly shifting space of rotating platforms, and projected images. Lisette Oropesa's Maria showcases 'a truly wonderful display of vocal intelligence, human warmth and a completely effortless, natural tone' (Süddeutsche Zeitung), while Kate Lindsey's Elisabetta conveys the fury and despair of the English monarch with striking intensity. Under the baton of Antonello Manacorda and with the outstanding contribution of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, this production conquers through rhythm, movement, and physical presence as expressive forces. 'Lisette Oropesa imbues all of this with vocal mastery and emotion. Beyond pure virtuosity, she shapes the inner workings of the character into operatic drama.' (Der Standard)

Musical sound waves circulate through space. From which is derived that seductive, yet also elusive, unstable, phenomenon, known as music.' Thus wrote Vladimir Jankelevitch in his essay La Presence lointaine (Distant Presence), exploring the mobility of musical sound through a comparative reflection on the works of Isaac Albeniz, Deodat de Severac, and Federico Mompou. These three composers shared the art of expressing the ineffable and transfiguring reality through the use of distinctive harmonies, colours, and resonances. They succeeded in conjuring up landscapes of profound poetry, from which Wilhem Latchoumia has drawn inspiration to imagine a fascinating and deeply moving voyage between France and Spain.

Wagner defined Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as the most complete work that he had ever created. The Bayreuth Festival 2025 presents the comedy in a new production staged by Matthias Davids, whose playful irreverence stands between tradition and renewal. Under the exceptional baton of Daniele Gatti, who debuted in Bayreuth in 2008 with Parsifal, the cast showcases it's brilliance and finesse. Georg Zeppenfeld, at the core of the performance, interprets Hans Sachs with excellent vocal skills and particular sensibility. Equally remarkable performances are given by Michael Spyres and Christina Nilsson, respectively, as Walther and Eva, and by Michael Nagy as a finely drawn Beckmesser. The result is a compelling piece of music theatre: 'A comedy of manners where themes of art, tradition and human love arise naturally.' (Seen and Heard International) Michael Spyres 'has everything a Stolzing needs: he is effortlessly present, sounds light yet embodied in the upper register, a German knight with italianità.' (BR-KLASSIK)