Santtu conducts Shostakovich: Moscow Cheryomushki and Symphony No. 1 is the seventh album from Philharmonia Records. Led by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, these performances were recorded live at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, where they are resident. The Philharmonia Orchestra has an extensive legacy of recording the music of Shostakovich, and in this latest release it's Principal Conductor brings his own distinctive energy, precision, and flair to two contrasting masterpieces: the sharp-witted exuberance of Moscow Cheryomushki and the youthful brilliance of the First Symphony.

The Queen of Instruments meets one of the world's leading organists, Iveta Apkalna. The repertoire of the new album includes Vasks' Viatore and Te Deum, as well as Pärt's famous Spiegel i'm Spiegel, Pari intervallo, Trivium, and Annum per annum. Two of the most important contemporary composers are united on one album, celebrating Pärt's 90th birthday in 2025 and Vasks' 80th birthday in 2026. Also captured on this release is a milestone in music history: it is the first-ever solo organ recording made on the organ of the Ventspils Concert Hall "Latvija"-one of the most remarkable concert instruments in Northern Europe.

Franziska Fleischanderl calls her new CD solo un salterio - just a salterio. This title is not just an understatement, because Franziska Fleischanderl is quite simply THE salterio specialist worldwide. She has devoted herself entirely to her instrument, written a doctoral thesis on the salterio, discovered many works for the instrument in archives, and researched historical playing techniques. The title also refers to the instrumentation: while the salterio is known today only as an accompanying or continuo instrument, Franziska Fleischanderl shows that the instrument was widely used and played in aristocratic and clerical circles in the 17th century. Here, for the first time, she presents an entire CD programme of works for solo salterio, allowing her instrument to shine in many colours. She plucks it with her fingers, with special plectrums, and strikes it with various small hammers - a compendium of playing techniques that she has brought back to life through her research. For the listener, this creates a sensual, multi-coloured world of sound with enchanting melodies full of lightness.

Felix Draeseke's early affiliation with the music of Liszt and Wagner permeated his own compositions of the period, not least his Sonata quasi fantasia in C sharp minor, a work of sumptuous Wagnerian candour as well as balletic lightness. It also marked a significant turning-point from a revolutionary style to something more conservative. As Liszt wrote to him, 'Since Schumann's F sharp minor sonata, I know of no more such significant work of this genre.' The programme also includes a virtuoso Grande Fantaisie, two characterful Fantasiestucke and Chopin-like gestures in the Valse-Nocturne.

Dora Deliyska's programs are frequently dedicated to a specific theme that links the individual pieces together. At first glance, this does not appear to be the case with the present CD. Yet it would not be Dora Deliyska if there were not, in fact, a-perhaps mysterious-connection between the pieces performed. - Christian Kuhn

With Just Wonderful, Duo Giovivo presents it's fourth album on the GENUIN label, showcasing both wit and remarkable versatility. Multi-instrumentalists Fabian Bloch and Muriel Zeiter bring together lively dances, jazz-inspired hits, well-known opera melodies, and freshly reimagined children's classics. Drawing on a total of seven instruments, they create an extraordinary sonic palette: Fabian Bloch effortlessly moves between euphonium, alphorn, bass trumpet, and Wunderhorn, while Muriel Zeiter impresses on piano, violin, and flute. Be it the Swedish "Vallflickans Dans" or the jazzy "What a Wonderful World," each piece is given it's own distinctive, highly personal character. A vividly crafted album that radiates joie de vivre-fresh, passionate, virtuosic, and just wonderful.

While Pygmalion, Rameau's emblematic work, reveals the passion of a sculptor in love with his creation, Pierre Iso's Zemide reveals the gentle tyranny of Love, weaving an allegory in which even the fiercest hearts yield to it's power. Like Galatea awakening under Pygmalion's gaze, this vibrant programme of Baroque passion comes to life under the inspired direction of Reinoud Van Mechelen, offering a spectacle where music and sentiment intertwine in dazzling symphonies.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier, with his Messe a quatre choeurs, delivers a unique work that reflects a rare encounter between French tradition and the splendor of Roman Baroque. Inspired by the grand polychoral works of Gabrieli and Benevoli whom he listened to attentively during his stay in Italy he unfolds a choral dialogue of exceptional breadth. Four vocal and instrumental ensembles face each other, respond, and intertwine in a play of echoes and timbres that transcends the liturgical space. Jean-Baptiste Nicolas brings an exalted momentum to this masterpiece of sacred music, combining stylistic precision with interpretative finesse.

The Summer Night Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic is the world's biggest annual classical open-air concert that takes place in the magical setting of the Schonbrunn Palace Baroque park in Vienna. This year marks the first time that Maestro Tugan Sokhiev will conduct the Summer Night Concert. The vocal soloist is world-renowned tenor Piotr Beczala, who will perform three iconic arias from: Georges Bizet's Carmen, Giacomo Puccini's Turandot and Emmerich Kalman's Grafin Mariza. With this open-air concert in Schonbrunn, the Vienna Philharmonic wishes to provide all Viennese, as well as visitors to the city, with a special musical experience in the impressive setting of Schonbrunn Palace and it's beautiful baroque gardens, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Since 2004 the Vienna Philharmonic has provided an outstanding experience for the audience. The focus of this year's program is on well-known melodies from opera and operetta that lead us on a musical journey through various European landscapes und milieus.

Myron Silberstein, Brooklyn-born (in 1974) and a long-term resident of Chicago, belongs to that centuries-old tradition of the composer-pianist. But here the distant roots are not so much in Mozart and Beethoven as in Copland and Barber. Silberstein's language echoes the tradition of earlier American composers like Creston, Mennin, and Persichetti, and his tonal harmony may remind some listeners of mid-twentieth-century jazz, especially in it's sense of improvisatory freedom. Like much of American culture more generally, it is open, outgoing, and often positive in spirit.

The music of the Yorkshire-born Arnold Cooke (1906-2005) - inventively contrapuntal, lyrical and energetic in turns - does not deserve the neglect it suffered even in it's composer's lifetime. This second album of two presenting all five of Cooke's string quartets underlines his reputation for resourceful craftsmanship, presented in a style which sits downstream from Hindemith, with whom he studied in Berlin, and from Bartok. There is also a surprisingly strong dance element in all three works heard here, though tempered, even in their lighter moments, by something of the emotional reticence of Britten's quartets.

The compositional career of Robin Stevens, Welsh-born (in 1958) and Manchester-based, is divided into two periods, separated by a period of illness. The first mainly produced chamber music and works for the church that employed him; restored to health, he found an appetite for larger forms, writing three substantial concertos and a number of other orchestral works. Stevens' substantial, four-movement Cello Concerto is something of a symphony-with-cello, casting the orchestra in kaleidoscopic discussion with the soloist. Here the Concerto sits between a charming orchestral miniature and a searching symphonic poem.

This fifth volume of the orchestral works of the late-Romantic Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) brings two works deeply bound up with his native Solothurn, in the north-west of the country. His Fastnachts-Sinfonie, or 'Carnival Symphony', is an expansive symphonic poem predicated on local legend and folk tradition, embracing both frolic and feeling. The Third Symphony - in which one can hear traces of Bruckner, and Richard Strauss - celebrates the rolling hills and endless skies of the Bucheggberg, where he loved to go walking, and where, the freewheeling music would suggest, his heart found freedom.

Tarquinio Merula belonged to a generation of Italian composers, all of whom were born around 1600, for whom the concertante style was no longer a new idiom but a preferred musical medium, one that had been acquired in childhood and which had become not only the dominant musical language of the time but which was also to spread across the whole of Europe. Tarquinio Merula was renowned as a violin and organ virtuoso and published a wide variety of instrumental music per la chiesa e la camera. Here Inalto explores Merula's sacred works, including the famous lullaby Hor che e tempo di dormire. His works may seem simple at times, but are impressively innovative; whilst sacred in character, they are rooted in human emotion.

The symphonies of the Bulgarian composer-conductor Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) explore the darker side of the human spirit in monumental scores as austere as they are powerful, his language sitting somewhere between Shostakovich, Varèse, Pettersson, and Simpson in it's fierce, explosive energy and elemental drive. His Tenth Symphony (2018) opens with the first of many wild outbursts that occasionally give way to islands of uneasy calm. The inconsolable sorrow of the slow movement finally boils up into an epic passage of colossal anger. By way of contrast, the scherzo opens in a mood of mischievous humour that soon spirals into a swirling, headlong, white-knuckle ride. Like the first movement, the finale sets off with the untrammelled power of a raging flood; it abates only briefly, to reveal a blasted landscape suggesting Kafka's 'There is hope - but not for us'. The Symphony is prefaced here by a dignified, deeply felt symphonic essay for strings, an epitaph for lost love.

In 1725, Jose de Torres crafts the narrative of the royal funerals of Spain's first Bourbon monarchs. At the heart of this tribute, the Misa de difuntos para Luis I, the first Bourbon born on Iberian soil, blends with exquisite finesse the echoes of Versailles with the exuberant splendour of Spanish Baroque. The offering is here completed by the monumental Dies Irae by Francisco Corselli, a Franco-Italian composer, to the glory of Philip V. Alberto Miguelez Rouco revives these rare works, bringing the music of the Real Capilla de Madrid to life in the Royal Chapel of Versailles!

In addition to his reputation as a dancer, the Sun King was also a musician. Under the enlightened influence of his mother, Anne of Austria, the young Louis XIV learned to play the lute and then the guitar. Once relegated to commoners, this instrument became a symbol of royal refinement. Beyond simple entertainment, this musical craze served a political purpose: to seduce the court and the people, and to weave harmony between French, Italian and Spanish cultures. Like a new King David, monarch-musician par excellence, Louis XIV crafted the image of an Apollonian sovereign, master of the arts as much as of power. Together with exceptional musicians, Lea Masson reveals this forgotten facet of the guitarist king!

While the famous Te Deum secured Charpentier's place in history, it was undoubtedly his Messe de Minuit that most contributed to his renown. True to Charpentier's genius, this mass is a perfect synthesis of the secular and the sacred, popular melodies and refined composition, offering a piece of remarkable originality and joy. These melodies, familiar to all, peasants and gentlemen alike, are enriched by orchestral parts and interwoven with subtle counterpoint and renewed harmony. The pleasure of music is thus offered to everyone: to recognise a familiar tune, or to grasp it's extraordinary arrangement. Under the direction of Gaetan Jarry, the Marguerite Louise ensemble sublimates these Latin oratorios and French pastorals, infusing the Christmas celebration with unparalleled fervour!

In the autumn of 1725, as France celebrated the union of Louis XV and Marie Leszczynska, the French ambassador in Venice entrusted Vivaldi with the composition of a serenata in honor of the young royal couple. This commission inspired a sumptuous work, carried by two allegorical figures: Imeneo, god of marriage, and Gloria, the radiant embodiment of French majesty. In turn, these voices rise, echo each other, and gracefully contend in virtuosity, before blending in a sumptuous final duet, sealing their tribute in perfect harmony. Logan Lopez Gonzalez and Nicolo Balducci lend their talent and sensitivity to these roles, exalting Vivaldi's music. In the profusion of his work, this brief yet striking piece stands out as much for it's diplomatic finesse as for it's inspired brilliance - an enchantment offered to the French Court.

With Hail! Bright Cecilia, Henry Purcell, herald of the British Baroque, pays tribute to the patron saint of music through a score widely regarded as one of his masterpieces. Composed in 1692, this ode reflects both the artistic effervescence of 17th-century England and the central role of music in society at the time. Vincent Dumestre and Le Poeme Harmonique reveal the full expressive richness of Purcell's writing in a performance where jubilant brilliance, lyrical delicacy, and dramatic contrasts unfold with infectious vitality. Alternating between recitatives, solo arias, and sumptuous choruses, the score showcases Purcell's mastery of musical dramaturgy, balancing orchestral refinement with controlled theatricality.