At the height of the Renaissance, the music of Orlande de Lassus frequently combines the emotion of secular music with sacred compositions. With their erotic connotations, the texts of The Song of Songs are an ideal source for bringing together sacred and profane feelings. Based on his most famous song, Lassus wrote one of his unitary masses: Suzanne un jour. Along with the Magnificat that he composed on De Rore's madrigal Ancor che col partire, here are two religious compositions of which the themes are borrowed from evocations of amorous turmoil.

This album is divided into three parts, the Annunciation, the Nativity and the Feast. The program begins and ends with two songs of oral tradition played on bagpipes and with Ciaramelli, instruments which have become synonymous with Christmas. All of the pieces from this album came from books and ancient manuscripts.

This outstanding new live recording brings together groundbreaking works by Arnold Schoenberg and Dmitri Shostakovich, two of the twentieth century’s most monumental composers. Arnold Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre is set to the Jewish prayer which is said on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The work premiered in Los Angeles in 1938, four years after Schoenberg fled Europe, and one month before the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht took place across Nazi-occupied Germany. Philip Huscher described the work as a “stark, strong modernist statement.” Shostakovich’s Suite on Versees of Michelangelo Buona explores themes just as weighty, including love, morality, death, and the resilience of the human spirit, all shown through the poetry of Renaissance great, Michelangelo. The work was originally conceived to honor Michelangelo’s 500th birthday. The Chicago Tribune commented on these performances, “Such was his textual penetration that [Abdrazakov] was able to extract the full emotional weight of the words and music, abetted by Muti’s finely detailed exposition of the spare orchestral fabric.”

On this remarkable recording, Out of the Shadows: Rediscovered American Art Songs, a century’s worth of treasures emerge from the shadows of both memory and history. The discovery of these songs began years ago, when soprano Lisa Delan was a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Her teachers, some of whom were contemporaries of the composers, recognized the artistic value of several of these works. Knowing that Ms. Delan would imbue them with special interpretive qualities, they presented her with copies of some of the music now on this disc. She decided to go further, to discover additional Americana—a kind of musical excavation that would bring to light and to life a body of art songs that deserved to be better known. Mined from extensive research, the gems on this CD are priceless additions to the art song genre. They form a compelling body of literature that, until now, has been underrepresented or completely unrepresented on recordings. These songs honor the universality of the human experience—love, loss, faith, joy, sadness, nostalgia—in uniquely American settings. The spirit, pragmatism and romanticism of a country born in revolution and maturing in reason and hopefulness is evident in these works. It’s all here, in 31 songs by ten composers. The tonal palette of each of these composers reveals a singular style, in hues rich, varied and distinctively American.

This is the seventh disc in the Bach Collegium Japan and Masaaki Suzuki’s series of secular cantatas by J. S. Bach. The best known of these cantatas is featured on this installment, the ever popular “Peasant Cantata.” The piece was written in broad dialect, and set to music which was based around folk songs, making it accessible to the greater population rather than the educated elite. The soprano cantata BWV 209 was composed as a musical farewell to one of Bach’s pupils upon his departure from Leipzig. Finally, Amore traitor for bass solo follows the story of a lover who accuses Amor of betrayal and deception. The closing aria is distinct, utilizing both the voice and the harpsichord in virtuosic passages.

In order to take a respite and, in his own worlds, “to recuperate,” from his own compositions, Max Reger frequently engaged in “piece work,” in which he would arrange works by other composers. This release includes Reger’s original work 5 Orchestral Songs, as well as Reger’s arrangements of songs for voice and orchestra from Edvard Grieg, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Franz Schubert. Conductor Gregor Buhl has made his mark as an opera conductor. He also frequently performs on the concert stage with the Radio Symphony Orchestras of Berlin, Hamburg, and Leizip, and the Helsinki Philharmonic.

Gothic Voices, the world-famous early music ensemble, makes its Linn debut with a recording celebrating the biblical matriarch Mary. Pieces from contemporary composers Joanne Metcalf and Andrew Smith sit alongside setting of Marian texts from the 13th and 14th centuries. Notably, there is a rare setting of English biblical text which precedes the first publication of an English language bible by 150 years. Mary in her various guises – caring mother, virgin lover, guiding light – are explored through settings of ancient ritualistic texts showing her mythical and human aspects, whilst contemporary settings relate the themes to the modern day. The contemporary works are cleverly constructed around a modal core so that they fit perfectly with the structure and sound of the early music compositions. With over thirty years experience Gothic Voices’ complete understanding of every aspect of early music performance is exceptional. Throughout its career Gothic Voices has been world-renowned for the excellence, refinement and spirituality of its performances of medieval music and has appeared throughout Europe and in the Americas. Originally founded in 1980 by the scholar and musician Christopher Page, Gothic Voices has gone on to release over twenty recordings, three of which won the coveted Gramophone Early Music Award. With imaginative programs using voices in varying combinations to produce authoritative performances of great beauty, Gothic Voices has won the appreciation of audiences all over the world. Gothic Voices’ wonderfully evocative sound world resulted in over a million sales of its debut featuring the music of Hildegard of Bingen.

Soprano Janet Perry hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She began her career with lessons on piano and violin at a young age. In her adulthood she has found resounding success, having recorded several major works under Karajan’s baton, including Mozart’s C Minor Mass, Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and Bruckner’s Te Deum. Perry writes of the works chosen, “...classical music has truly made me who I am today. It has been a constant companion since my earliest childhood... The songs of Mozart Debussy, Faure, Duparc, and Strauss have been in my repertoire for a long time, we are old friends who enjoy music-and the silence between the notes, together.” Perry is accompanied by pianist Jean Lemaire, who specializes in accompaniment and chamber music. He frequently performs throughout Europe, the USA, Japan, and South America.

After his 1920s opera The Birds, Walter Braunfels shot into stardom and enjoyed a highly successful career. Braunfels’ versatile catalog of compositions includes a great deal of choral works, orchestral works, operas, Lieder, chamber music, and piano works. He was frequently praised as a cosmopolitan representative of new music, and the most highly regarded conductors of the era frequently performed his music. Branfels himself regarded his compositional style as traditional late-Romanticism, and saw himself a successor to Wagner, Bruckner, and Berlioz. These beautiful orchestral songs are sung by some of the most respected voices of our time, including Valentina Farcas and Michael Volle.

English composer George Butterworth (1885-1916) did not write a great deal of music. In fact, during the war he destroyed some of his works for fear he wouldn’t return from battle and wouldn’t be able to revise them. He is most known for his orchestral setting “A Shropshire Lad” which is the ‘orchestral epilogue’ to the original vocal settings of A. E. Housman’s poems. Also especially notable on this release is an “Orchestral Fantasia.” Butterworth began this composition before the war broke out, and a three and a half minute section was preserved. The conductor of this release, Kriss Russman, has picked up where Butterworth left off, adding around five minutes of music where he develops Butterworth’s original ideas and adds additional material.