From William Byrd, Gabriel Faure and Sergei Rachmaninoff to Reena Esmail, Errollyn Wallen and Bob Chilcott, the RBC Chamber Choir presents a richly varied celebration of Christmas choral music, echoing it's popular annual candlelit performances at Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Conducted by Julian Wilkins, the choir captures the warmth, wonder and exhilaration of the Christmas season in a programme spanning five centuries of choral music.

This attractive program brings together a fine selection of solo and concertante works for organ, as played by the young and highly talented Czech organist Adam Suk. Probably the best-known and most frequently performed organ concerto with orchestra ever was written by French composer Francis Poulenc. Although several separate parts can be recognized in it's course, it is written as an uninterrupted single-movement flow of music. The mood of the concerto is deep, dark and introspective, yet it bears all the typical hallmarks of Poulenc's music: distinctive melodic invention, a sense of contrast, and subtle irony. Another organ concerto presented here is by Franz Xaver Brixi, a Bohemian who worked at the Benedictine Church of St. George at Prague Castle, where he wrote several organ concertos specifically for this venue - a form that was not at all common at the time. The Organ Concerto in D major retains the classical three-movement structure (fast-slow-fast). In style, it is more of a classical work, light and free of the complex 'Bachian' Baroque polyphony. As a start of the program we here three works for organ solo by Pachelbel and Johann Sebastian Bach, whose Sinfonia from Cantata No.29 'Wir danken dir Gott, wir danken dir' BWV29 whose festive tone is enhanced by three trumpets with timpani and an unusually virtuoso organ part. Adam Suk (born 2005) won several national and international competitions and builds an impressive career both as soloist and with orchestras, like the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice. Vahan Mardirossian leads Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice in the concertante works on this recording.

The classicism that emerged in Vienna with Mozart and Haydn was later revisited by Prokofiev in Russia, Poulenc in France, and, most unexpectedly, Villa-Lobos in Brazil. Each composer reimagined this tradition through a sparkling, modern, and energetic lens shaped by their own heritage. Now, Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes leads the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien in a program that takes us back to the city where this tradition was born. Recorded in Vienna and featuring Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, Villa-Lobos's Sinfonietta 'In Memory of Mozart', and Poulenc's Sinfonietta, these performances bring the music full circle. A dialogue across continents and centuries, shaped by clarity and contrast, this is a vibrant and cosmopolitan homage.

Sandrine Piau and David Kadouch are reuniting for a project that the French soprano conceived as the second part of a diptych begun with Voyage intime (Alpha 911). This time we enter the world of childhood, but even though this album is called Contes, 'these aren't stories for children,' says David Kadouch. Actually, these stories might even present themselves in a way that provokes anxiety-dark and menacing Sandrine Piau continues: 'Folk tales and legends often serve as an initiation, and they also act providentially as pebbles that guide us through the forest of our most secret atavistic fears.' With their well-known and recognised expertise, Piau and Kadouch bring together composers from a variety of linguistic and artistic backgrounds-Hahn, Debussy, Ravel, Wolf, Strauss, Zemlinsky, Poulenc, Shostakovich-and introduce us to fascinating female composers such as Jeanne Bernard (1895-1965), Wally Karnevo (1914-2015), Louise Didier (1872-1955), and Ilse Weber (1903-1944).

For so many, coming out is framed as a kind of reckoning-a threshold one must cross, as if queerness begins in secrecy and only later earns the right to be spoken aloud. That narrative suggests burden before freedom, fear before love. But why should love require courage simply to exist? Such is the world we've inherited. For centuries, desire that fell outside society's narrow definitions was forced underground, met with shame, exile, or silence. In that silence, letters became a refuge: fragile but fearless vessels for truths that could not be safely expressed aloud. The Secret Letter re-imagines a program of the same name performed by Cantus in the spring of 2025, weaving music together with excerpts from letters by Marcus Aurelius, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and others. These interludes offer fleeting access to private moments of longing, devotion, and vulnerability, while the surrounding music expands and amplifies their emotional terrain, carrying forward their tension, tenderness, restraint, and release. Letters are remarkable things. They are both private and exposed, meant for a single reader yet capable of outliving both the writer and recipient. Passed between trembling hands, they hold confessions, desires, and love stories told in ink rather than whispers. The Secret Letter bears witness and celebrates queer love that has always existed-persistent, imaginative, and worthy of song-and that even in secrecy, has found ways to speak, to sing, and to survive.

After Brass (RCO 07002) and Brass Too (RCO 14010), recorded by the Brass of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Woodwinds of the RCO proudly present their own CD. Traditionally most RCO members love to engage in chamber music as well and the woodwinds section of the orchestra is no exception. In the past woodwind ensembles like the Concertgebouw Sextet (1909-1937) and the Danzi Quintet (1958-1978) have even been very successful outside of the Netherlands. This SACD pays homage to this tradition.

‘Rencontre' is the first recital album of soprano Raquel Camarinha and pianist Yoan Héreau, new signings on Naïve. It crystallizes several years of passionate live music-making for the duo. From Debussy to Poulenc, via Ravel and the all-too rare Delage, we are invited on a journey akin to a game of mirrors between composers, music, poems, characters and performers, that is in turn amorous, dreamlike, mysterious and wonderfully evocative. The Portuguese soprano Raquel Camarinha was born in Braga in 1986. She began her vocal studies in 2000, completed the Secondary Singing Course in 2004, and in 2009 the Undergraduate Course in Music, at the University of Aveiro. In 2011 she took her master’s degree at the Paris Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique et Danse, in the class of Chantal Mathias. Winner of several national and international awards, in 2011 she won first prize at the Luísa Todi National Singing Competition in Portugal, as well as the Best Female Performer Award at the Armel Opera Competition in Hungary.

Denmark’s leading instrumentalists Ulla Miilmann (flute) and Tine Rehling (harp) joined forces to record a superb collection of late romantic and impressionistic works by an alley of foremost composers of France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ulla Miilmann and Tine Rehling began their collaboration as duo in 2007. They have since been dazzling wide range of audiences with their pure and elegant interpretation of repertoire with a significant emphasis on French music.

Poulenc wrote his "Stabat Mater," a hauntingly passionate work, after visiting the sacred shrine of the Black Madonna of Rocamadour. He made a pilgrimage to her remote chapel in the south of France after a good friend of his was hilled in a car accident.

Francis Poulenc is perhaps the composer whose works come the closest to embodying the French esprit, a multivalent term referring to a special blend of brilliance, sensuousness, aestheticism, and above all Frenchness. This is music that is mirthful as well as serious, entertaining and demanding, and superficial as well as profound. It was thus that Francis Poulenc composed, he who called himself »Poulenc-Janus« in an allusion to the Roman god who had two faces and could simultaneously look this way and that. Poulenc’s music is often stamped by this ambiguity, and his chamber music for winds is the ideal repertoire for the cpo debut of an aspiring young ensemble from Denmark: the Ensemble MidtVest. This ensemble is formed by eleven musicians, enthusiasts as well as individualists, who are graduates of leading European and American musical institutions of higher learning, and some of them have repeatedly been honored with prizes. The ensemble was founded in 2002 and has earned a fine reputation for its creative programs, high artistic level, and constant questioning of the conventional concert form. Its core formation for string quartet, wind quintet, and piano promotes flexibility, variation, and rich color in the combination of instruments. The Ensemble MidtVest performs as a duo as well as a sonorous nonet. It is one of the five »basis ensembles« in Denmark.

- CPO

Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character in a way that defies generalization, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry - both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. This is the fourth release in our series that will encompass the complete songs of Francis Poulenc, performed by some of the greatest singers of the day and accompanied by the exceptional Malcolm Martineau.

Composing over 150 works for piano and voice over a period of 44 years, the songs of Francis Poulenc remain consistently popular to concert audiences the world over. Varying in their individual style and character, Poulenc set music to a wide range of different French poetry – both ancient and modern, and from the serious to the surreal. The final disc in Signum’s series of The Complete Songs of Francis Poulenc features a cast of the finest singers of our generation, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau as well as additional instrumental soloists for Poulenc’s larger-ensemble settings of his songs.

Francis Poulenc is considered one of the greatest melodists of the 20th century but it is his individual and immediately recognizable harmonic language that makes his music so distinctive. Often overlooked in his lifetime and in the years after his death, his sacred music was an expression of his more serious side and, following the death of his close friend, Pierre-Octave Ferroud, a re-awakening of his religious faith. The Sixteen’s new recording centers around the themes of conflict and atonement, reflecting both Poulenc’s intense internal struggles and the turbulence of life in France during the mid-20th century. “Some choirs of high renown aim for a kind of robotic perfection in sync with the digital age. Christophers’ troupe contains human beings coloring lines with individual hues, yet still acting and breathing as one.” (The Times)

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REVIEW:

The sacred music of Francis Poulenc would seem somewhat off the regular path of the popular British choir The Sixteen, but they show themselves to be sensitive and skillful Poulenc interpreters. The Mass in G is perfectly controlled, but somehow radiant.

– All Music Guide

Francis Poulenc is not an easy composer to relate to. Not the man himself perhaps- though possibly that too- but his music. It is somehow dated. Here is a composer who produced his best works, all more or less completely tonal, at a time when Arnold Schoenberg was writing twelve-tone music and Poulenc's countrymen Oliver Messiaen and Pierre Boulez were into innovative rhythms, scales and techniques to lift the music out of the realm of subjective emotionalism. This release features three concertos by Francis Poulenc. The Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani (1938) is considered to be the most popular and, perhaps, the most serious. The Piano Concerto (1949), a light concerto a wellspring of musical ideas, more or less brutally juxtaposed. The Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1932) lies perhaps somewhere between these two.