Howard Skempton is recognized as one of the UK’s most renowned and respected living composers. Although particularly influenced by Benjamin Britten (with whom he worked), John Cage, and Cornelius Cardew, Skempton’s music inhabits its own unique sound world. His major new work, 50 Preludes and Fugues for Organ (written 2022-23), is given its world premiere recording by Matthew Owens on two of the finest organs in the UK, St George’s Church, Hanover Square, London, and Merton College, Oxford. Inspired by J.S. Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues, Skempton takes us on a contemporary journey in his own inimitable style and pays homage to Bach through two extra pairs of Preludes and Fugues. Additional works on this album include the composer’s earliest organ work, Wedding March (1971), and his latest, Recessional 2, written especially for this recording.

Highly acclaimed organist Stephen Farr presents an album of organ works by composer Francis Grier, performed on the American-built Dobson Organ of Merton College, Oxford.

Grier demonstrates an individual approach to timbre and texture in writing for the organ and shows fascinating traits which are a testament to a wide range of musical, and non-musical, influences extending beyond the bounds of the cathedral world to experiences drawn from his years in India.

The album features "A Celebration for All Saints," commissioned by Farr and first performed in 2022, "De Profundis" scored for organ and cello, performed here by Indira Grier, "Flourish and Reverie" dating from shortly after Grier’s return from India in 1990, and "Wir haben schwerlich," composed to join works by a variety of composers in the Orgelbüchlein Project.

The Rautio Piano Trio returns to Resonus with this second volume of Beethoven’s Piano Trios, recorded on period instruments. The album features his Op. 11 trio – ‘Gassenhauer’ – together with his Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 3, showcasing the young composer’s early mastery of the genre; and his virtuosic Variations for Piano Trio Op. 44. This is the culmination of the Trio’s wider project charting the evolution of the piano trio from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century, with the music of J.C. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, through to Beethoven’s complex and mature realization of the genre.

Guitarist James Akers presents Fantaisie Romantique – a collection of premier recordings of significant works by little-known Eastern European guitarist composers of the nineteenth century. With many of the works based on popular pieces of the day, including opera arias and folk melodies, it gives them an accessibility that belies their obscurity and underpins their virtuosity. Having been neglected for over a century this recording attempts a reassessment of these composers and their work employing period instruments and techniques to render them as sympathetically and accurately as possible.

In this, the final volume of his landmark survey of the piano works of Elisabeth Lutyens, pianist Martin Jones presents further world premiere recordings from this undeservedly neglected composer. Featuring works from across the span of Lutyen’s career, the earliest works to be included on this album are the short pieces Overture, Berceuse, Barcarolle and Dance Souvenance from 1944. The unpublished Holiday Diary from 1949, Helix from 1967, and Three Books of Bagatelles from 1979 complete the set.

Keyboardist Steven Devine continues this complete survey of Johann Ludwig Krebs’ significant contribution to the keyboard genre with the third volume in this series dedicated to the composer’s keyboard works. Featuring one of the three surviving Partitas from a presumed set of six, this album also includes the world premiere recording of Krebs’ Six Keyboard Sonatas (Krebs-WV 832-837), that only came to light during the historic restoration of the archive of the Sing-Akademie to Berlin following its removal to Ukraine during the war in 1943. With a compositional style that points to a period later in Krebs’s life, these charming, witty and sometimes quirky works clearly demonstrate the composer’s confident yet straightforward charm.

In 2015, composer Michael Zev Gordon took up the idea of writing musical diary entries, which has spawned this ongoing series of small pieces for solo piano. With most written in a single day, with only minor subsequent refinements, Gordon beautifully captures a feeling, a nuance, an image and, as is the nature of a diary, often with personal associations. Pianist Joseph Houston sensitively responds to Gordon’s recurring themes of the bitter-sweet waltz, unwavering stillness, elegiac simplicity, folk-like dances and fleeting brilliance.

Celebrated as one of the finest Tudor composers, Thomas Weelkes served as organist and choirmaster at Winchester College and Chichester Cathedral and although famed for his madrigals, wrote more Anglican services than any other major composer of the time. Performed by the professional Irish vocal ensemble Resurgam with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, this album celebrates the sacred music from this prolific composer in Weelkes’ 400th anniversary year.

Winners of the First Prize at the inaugural Birmingham International Piano Chamber Music Competition, violinist Usha Kapoor and pianist Edward Leung present an album of violin sonatas by American composers Amy Beach and John Corigliano. The album features Beach’s large-scale chamber work of 1896, the Sonata for Violin and Piano Op. 34, and her earlier Romance for Violin and Piano, Op. 23 from 1893, together with Corigliano’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. Completed in 1963, this work was originally called ‘Duo’ and is very much intended for two equal musical partners.

Franco Alfano was a major musician and teacher who enjoyed considerable success with his operas during his lifetime, but who has been overlooked for decades. Generally regarded as the regenerator of the Italian art song, the works featured in this album offer a generous overview of Alfano’s vocal output, from his Opus 1 Cinq mélodies, written in 1896 when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Leipzig, to Due liriche per canto, violoncello e pianoforte from 1949, five years before his death. Anna Pirozzi has established herself as the leading Italian dramatic soprano of today, performing on the most prestigious international opera stages. She is joined here by the acclaimed pianist Emma Abbate and renowned cellist Bozidar Vukotic.

For over 100 years the only opera by a woman to have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Der Wald is a taut, brooding drama where the simplicity of village life comes under threat from the uncontrollable desires unleashed by the darkness of the forest. Richly orchestrated, harmonically daring, and demanding a huge expressive range from the cast, the narrative drives relentlessly forward from wedding to tragedy in a single act, observed pitilessly by the eternal spirits of the forest. John Andrews conducts the BBC Singers, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and an international cast in the first ever recording of this work, using Smyth’s English version of the libretto.

The harpsichord concertos of J.S. Bach form the origins of the keyboard concerto genre that was to continue to flourish through the music of his sons, C.P.E. Bach and J.C. Bach, and onwards. Here, celebrated keyboardist Steven Devine is joined by members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in this recording that features the Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052, Concerto in A major BWV 1055, and the Concerto in D major BWV1054, together with a new reconstruction by Steven Devine of the Concerto in D minor BWV 1059.

Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the most successful and wealthiest German Baroque composers and his Twelve Fantasias for solo flute, TWV 40:2–13 were written between 1727 and 1732. The pieces are given a systematic structure with the pieces in alphabetical order by key, A to G, major and minor. In these solo Fantasias, Telemann combines secular and sacred music using a variety of forms. Solemn courtly dances and rhythmic central European country dances engage in dialogue with pieces that are more akin to the serious and strictly polyphonic musical tradition of the Catholic Mass. Finnish flautist Sami Junnonen performs on a modern Japanese Muramatsu flute, hand-crafted in twenty-four carat gold in the 2000s.

In their debut album, the Sakuntala Trio presents the world premiere recording of Franz Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat major, D.471, in this innovative and compelling completion by Professor Brian Newbould. Of this first trio, only the first movement and the beginning of the slow movement, were penned by Schubert, before he abandoned the work, leaving a gem of a fragment. The album also features the second version of Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat major, D.581, together with a selection of Peter Warlock’s transcriptions of Henry Purcell’s Three-Part Fantasias.

Alla Milanese (‘in the Milanese style’) explores the connections between musicians at the heart of Milan’s scene for experimental music, c.1592–1626. Alongside compositions from the city’s most illustrious musical families – Rognoni and Cima – The Gonzaga Band has sought to rediscover the music of their lesser-known contemporaries, including Biumi, Casato, and the nun-composer Caterina Assandra, to illuminate a rich and complex network of stylistic innovation at the dawn of the Baroque era.

Pamela Harrison belongs to a generation of women composers whose star shone brightly in the aftermath of the second world war but who subsequently faded into obscurity as the establishment turned towards the Continental avant-garde. Here, the Gould Piano Trio, with clarinettist and project curator Robert Plane, are joined by friends and colleagues in this survey of her work. The Violin Sonatina of 1949 is the earliest work of Harrison’s to feature on this album of world premiere recordings, and this compelling programme also features the thematically linked Clarinet Quintet and Piano Trio, along with the Clarinet Sonata. The short work for clarinet and piano, Drifting Away, is inspired by the W.B. Yeats line ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters’.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pianist Mark Bebbington, members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, present a recording of the composer’s almost totally neglected orchestral work, Fantasia on the ‘Old 104th’ Psalm Tune, for solo piano, choir and orchestra premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1950. The album also features the Romance for viola and piano; the ever popular The Lark Ascending in the original 1914 version for solo violin and piano; and the early but ambitious Piano Quintet of 1903, which was embargoed until as late as the 1990s and scored for the same combination of instruments as Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet.