Sir Stephen Hough's new solo piano album, Stephen Hough's Piano Postcards, explores the world from the perspective of the itinerant pianist sending home musical messages from his voyages. Music from Asia includes "Spring breeze prelude" by Taiwanese composer Deng Yu-Hsien and a piano version of "Aka tombo," a children's song so beloved in Japan that it features in citywide "5-o'clock chimes" across the country. Folk and popular traditions appear in "Cielito lindo" and "Nature boy," while the final group of pieces turns to nature, with works by MacDowell, Schumann and Sinding. Alongside these musical travel diaries, he intersperses new transcriptions of songs from popular films, including arrangements he created for Lang Lang's 'Disney Book' album. This is the first chance Sir Stephen has had to include piano arrangements of songs from Frozen, Coco and Mary Poppins.

Christopher Tye is less famous than his Tudor contemporary Thomas Tallis and his documented life more chaotic, but the caliber of his Masses and polyphony are unsurpassed for color, full-textured fabric and interwoven melodic lines. The music may be English but the five members of Cinquecento ('16th century' in Italian) are pan-European, each bringing a lifetime of early music experience to forgotten masterpieces. This is their 17th album for Hyperion. Tye successfully negotiated the perilous politics of an era when successive monarchs, from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, pulled England back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism, and demanded that church music bend accordingly. The Peterhouse Mass recorded here survives in partbooks found in the Cambridge college of the same name; the missing tenor part has been reconstructed by Paul Doe.

From the late-Romantic Andante e Allegro con fuoco by Guido Alberto Fano and Dallapiccola's early wartime concerto to the final, much later work by Cristian Carrara, this album provides a welcome overview of the piano concerto in 20th and 21st century Italy. All four works benefit from the playing of Roberto Prosseda, whose talents as a champion of Italian contemporary music and of undiscovered piano music make him the ideal advocate.

Essential listening... "fabulously assured"... "unequivocally excellent", are just a few of the critical superlatives earned by Martyn Brabbins's magnificent Vaughan Williams symphony cycle. In this, the penultimate release of the series, two of the late symphonies are coupled with more rare works.

The great "Eroica" variations are the centerpiece of this program, which ends with two amusingly anglophile tributes, and contains some surprisingly under-appreciated Beethoven. This is an indispensable pendant to Angela Hewitt's ongoing survey of his piano sonatas.

Both sonatas recorded here are the work of the young Brahms, who was still a teenager when he wrote Op.2. They are paired with, and perfectly complement the much later rhapsodies. These are magisterial accounts from Garrick Ohlsson, a pianist noted for his mastery of the Romantics.

Vaughan Williams's incidental music for The Pilgrim's Progress has seldom been heard in it's original guise since the 1906 premiere. Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra couple it with outstanding interpretation of the composer's Symphony No 5.

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol.7 The latest installment of Angela Hewitt's much-lauded Beethoven cycle is bookended by the great 'Tempest' and Op.109 sonatas. The performances are as usual complemented by Angela's own booklet notes which provide real insight into how she approaches these masterworks.

Amsterdam Piano Trio / Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio; Schoenberg: Verklarte Nacht This album pairs two works separated by only 17 years, but whose composers seem at first glance to be worlds apart. The coupling of Tchaikovsky's monumental Piano Trio in A minor (1882) with Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht (1899, in it's original scoring for string sextet) reveals a line of musical continuity from the great Russian Romantic to the pioneering Viennese modernist. Verklarte Nacht has itself been transfigured here in a new, never-before-recorded arrangement for piano trio by Henk Guittart, one of the world's leading Schoenberg specialists. This debut recording from the Amsterdam Piano Trio features award-winning Hyperion pianist Andrey Gugnin alongside violinist Anna Lipkind-Mazor and cellist Dmitry Prokofiev.

From TV theme tunes to a folk-inspired 'circle dance on seven notes' by Villa-Lobos, Laurence Perkins-aided by a wide variety of accompanists-presents another pleasing miscellany of composers and works (no fewer than fourteen of each) demonstrating the many moods and expressive potential of the bassoon.

The Gesualdo Six/Owain Park - "Radiant Dawn". For their tenth Hyperion album, award-winning vocal supergroup The Gesualdo Six combine voices and trumpet to unearth the spirit of the surprise 1990s hit ECM album 'Officium' (Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble), launched when G6 director Owain Park was still in the cradle. Exploring fresh sound worlds, this album presents writing old and new, with two compositions commissioned specifically for the release. The Gesualdo Six regularly tour the world, giving 150+ concerts a year. The group has commissioned (and written) over 100 new works from a diverse range of composers and runs regular composition competitions.

Ikon/David Hill - "Howells: King David & Sine nomine". Herbert Howells was perhaps the most distinctive and revered composer of sacred choral music in 20th-century Britain. However, his non-sacred music has been long neglected; this album unearths Howells's little-known secular choral music. 12 of the 14 tracks here represent repertoire that is completely new to UMG. New arrangements by Iain Farrington have been specially made for this recording, including Howells's famous "King David" and the title track "Sine nomine." Ikon comprises the UK's foremost singers brought together to form one superchoir. David Hill MBE has held conducting posts with the Bach Choir, BBC Singers and Yale Schola Cantorum. Featuring starry soloists Ruairi Bowen (tenor), Hilary Cronin (soprano), Charlie Lovell-Jones (violin) and Iain Farrington (piano).

Mahan Esfahani - "Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1". Mahan Esfahani's hugely ambitious, complete Bach keyboard project reaches it's summit with Book 1 of the WellTempered Clavier. Bach wrote his seminal 48 Preludes & Fugues with a harpsichord in mind; this is a rare chance to hear the music as intended. Recorded on a German double-manual harpsichord built by Huw Saunders and based on an instrument thought to have belonged to Bach. Mahan's discography has thus far garnered a Gramophone Award, two BBC Music Magazine Awards, a Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Opus Klassik Recording of the Year, Diapason d'Or, Choc de Classica and an ICMA, among many other awards. 2 CD set.