Following the success of their 2023 digital EP, Rutter Orchestral Carols, the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge, releases a new album for Christmas 2025, featuring a selection of arrangements and original works for choir and orchestra under the direction of Daniel Hyde. Recorded in the beloved Chapel of Kings College Cambridge, All the Stars Looked Down sees the choir performing alongside Britten Sinfonia once again, and includes beautiful orchestral arrangements of Christmas carols by John Rutter alongside a selection of both well-loved and lesser-known carols by the great choral composers who have influenced him, including Philip Ledger, David Willcocks and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Woven throughout the album are works that are especially meaningful to the Choir and it's community and the albums title track, John Rutters All the Stars Looked Down, is dedicated to the late Sir Stephen Cleobury.
Hampus Lindwall's Brace for Impact might just be the first album of post-internet pipe organ music. It's an album of five new contemporary classical compositions, all performed by the composer himself on the 78-stop grand organ at St. Antonius church in Dusseldorf, Germany. Featuring the electric guitar of SUNN O)'s Stephen O'Malley on the title track. A highly visceral forty-five minutes of music with undeniable elemental power.
BRACE FOR IMPACT
$31.49
Vinyl
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Jun 20, 2025
IDOR62.1
WELSH MUSIC FOR STRINGS
RUBICON
Available as
CD
$20.49
Jul 25, 2025
An album of firsts - all these works are receiving world premiere recordings, and this is the only album devoted to music for strings by Welsh composers. Most listeners will be familiar with works for strings by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Tippett - they are some of the most famous works in the repertoire. The works on this album reveal that composers in Wales were also writing outstanding works for strings at the same time. Grace Williams was taught by Vaughan Williams, and her haunting Elegy leaves a deep impression on the listener. Morfydd Owen's brief Romance reflects her all to short life - tragically cut short in 1918 at just 26. Her trajectory as a composer was set high. William Matthias, one of the better known of Welsh composers, studied with Lennox Berkeley and was a child prodigy. Best known for his music for choir, he also wrote three symphonies and three piano concertos. His deft and polished Music for Strings displays his technical prowess to the full. Paul Mealor is one of the current generation of composers from Wales, studying with Mathias. His music was performed at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011, and Wherever You Are was the Christmas No.1 single in the UK in the same year. Arwel Hughes studied with Vaughan Williams and was a key player in the establishment of music at BBC Wales, becoming Head of Music in 1965. He composed in all fields, from oratorios, religious music, chamber and orchestral music - the latter often drawing on Welsh legends and history. Christopher Woods powerful Aberfan is a musical memorial to the harrowing tragedy that occurred on October 21, 1966 when a coal spoil tip engulfed a school killing 116 children and 28 adults in surrounding streets.
WELSH MUSIC FOR STRINGS
$20.49
CD
RUBICON
Jul 25, 2025
RBCN1198.2
STEVE REICH: JACOB'S LADDER / TRAVELER'S PRAYER
NONESUCH
Available as
CD
$14.99
Jul 11, 2025
Nonesuch Records releases an album comprising the first recordings of Steve Reich's two latest works-Jacob's Ladder (2023) and Traveler's Prayer (2020) -on July 11, 2025. Jacob's Ladder, performed by the New York Philharmonic led by Jaap van Zweden with Synergy Vocals, was made during it's October 2023 world premiere at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall. The premiere recording of Traveler's Prayer, performed by Colin Currie Group and Synergy Vocals, was made at Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, also in 2023. The two pieces were first released earlier this year as part of Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven-disc box set featuring music recorded during the composer's forty years on the label. Jacob's Ladder interprets, and draws text from, the Biblical book of Genesis, 28:12: And he dreamedAnd behold, a ladder set up on the EarthAnd it's top reached HeavenAnd behold, messengers of G-d ascending and descending on it. The composer explains, "Any melodic movement-up, down, or held-can find it's analogy on a ladder. Sometimes one only goes up a few rungs to reach something and then descends, or perhaps climbs higher, pauses, and then descends pausing at each rung on the way down. "There are four short sections-exposition, if you like-on each of the four lines of text then four longer sections elaborating on and developing those first four, " he continues. "What's particularly interesting to me in these much longer sections is that they are mostly instrumental music. The instrumental music interprets the movement of messenger/angels going up, down, or pausing on a ladder (or ladders) between heaven and earth: a musical interpretation without words. "Traveler's Prayer was composed before and during the 2020 pandemic. "The virus shifted the gravity of the words I was setting... three short excerpts from Genesis, Exodus and Psalms, " Reich says. "These excerpts are usually added to the full Traveler's Prayer found in Hebrew prayer books, " he continues. "While these verses can certainly apply to travels by air, car, or boat, they can also be applied to travel from this world to the next. "The first melody is from Biblical Hebrew chant in America and parts of Europe while the second is a more ornate style from Italy... The third melody I composed since, outside of Yemen, there is no existing tradition for chanting Psalms. As to structure, there are extremely free canons throughout.
STEVE REICH: JACOB'S LADDER / TRAVELER'S PRAYER
$14.99
CD
NONESUCH
Jul 11, 2025
NNS726733.2
RIPARIAN
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Available as
Vinyl
$32.99
Oct 31, 2025
Riparian is the first solo instrumental album by composer and multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang. Centered on the viola d'amore, Riparian unfolds two longform improvisations rooted in his self-devised concept of ecomusicality. Produced by Randall Dunn, the record offers a meditative, textural sound world shaped by Kang's deep lineage in microtonality, raga, and spiritual jazz. Music video features a commissioned performance by NY Yang Sheng Tai Chi Qi Gong Association in Chinatown, NYC. Warm, resonant, and quietly intense, Riparian invites deep listening across time and form.
RIPARIAN
$32.99
Vinyl
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Oct 31, 2025
IDOR100.1
URANIAN VOID
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Available as
Vinyl
$32.99
Oct 31, 2025
Uranian Void is the new solo release from acclaimed composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Jessika Kenney. Best known for her collaborations with Eyvind Kang and her haunting contributions to Midsommar, Kenney and producer Randall Dunn weave ghazals, hydrophone recordings, sine waves, and original texts into an immersive meditation on perception, resonance, and memory. Drawing on years of inquiry into acoustic space and psychic interiority, Uranian Void distills experimental vocal practice into something mystical, prismatic, and deeply felt.
URANIAN VOID
$32.99
Vinyl
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Oct 31, 2025
IDOR400.1
BARONS COURT
LATE MUSIC
Available as
Vinyl
$39.99
Jun 06, 2025
BARONS COURT
BARONS COURT
$39.99
Vinyl
LATE MUSIC
Jun 06, 2025
LTMS3.1
EDWARD GARDNER CONDUCTS BRITTEN
LPO
Available as
CD
$16.99
Jul 11, 2025
This is Edward Gardner's sixth release on LPO Label, and the third that celebrates the 20th anniversary of the label in 2025. This Britten program was recorded at London's Royal Festival Hall (Sinfonia da Requiem and The Prince of the Pagodas) and Saffron Hall (Winter Words). A bold, early masterpiece written at just twenty-six and originally commissioned to commemorate Japan's 2600th imperial anniversary, Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem was rejected for being too solemn, but emerged as his only major purely orchestral work and a powerful response to the growing threat of war. Winter Words Britten's poignant song cycle originally for tenor and piano, set to texts of 8 poems by Thomas Hardy is presented here in a new orchestration by Robin Holloway-a world premiere recording. The Prince of the Pagodas, Britten's ballet with Edward Gardner's distilled concert suite from The Prince of the Pagodas-another world premiere recording-fulfils Britten's unrealised ambition to arrange his full-length ballet into a dramatic orchestral suite.
EDWARD GARDNER CONDUCTS BRITTEN
$16.99
CD
LPO
Jul 11, 2025
LPOR134.2
INTERLINKED
MERCURY KX
Available as
CD
$14.99
Jan 03, 2025
Luke Howard/Juliano Nunes - "Interlinked" / Interlinked is a ballet scored by Luke Howard with contemporary choreographer Juliano Nunes, commissioned by the Birmingham Royal Ballet for the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and performed at the legendary Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2024. Verve Label Group; Mercury KX; Classical Crossover.
INTERLINKED
$14.99
CD
MERCURY KX
Jan 03, 2025
MCKX167064.2
PIANO STUDIES 337
MISSISSIPPI RECORDS
Available as
Vinyl
$26.99
Jul 11, 2025
Sublime private-press piano improvisations channeled from another world by Willem Nyland. Remastered from the original tapes and reissued for the first time, with in-depth liner notes by Matt Marble of the American Museum of Paramusicology. A Columbia-educated chemist by profession and a self-taught pianist by affinity, Willem Nyland (1890-1975) is known as a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Greek-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff. In the mid/late 1960s, a split with Gurdjieff led Nyland to start his own group in upstate New York. There, after a Friday night lecture on "The Work" and a shot of brandy, Nyland would launch into remarkable piano improvisations on a specially tuned baby grand, sometimes playing for over an hour. Each improvisation was meticulously recorded and cataloged, a major part of Nyland's teachings. 16 of these recordings were released as standalone LPs on Nyland's own Gauge Hill Press, with artwork by Hungarian American decorative artist Ilonka Karasz, Nyland's wife of over 50 years. These records, with their cascading, deeply emotional playing and beautiful cover art, have become highly coveted by collectors and "paramusicologists." Each contains depths of spiritual information and lyrical, almost visual instrumental storytelling. Nyland deftly and subtly shifts moods and tones throughout these truly inspired extended improvisations.
PIANO STUDIES 337
$26.99
Vinyl
MISSISSIPPI RECORDS
Jul 11, 2025
MSRE215.1
TULPA
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Available as
Vinyl
$32.99
Oct 31, 2025
Tulpa is the debut studio full-length LP by experimental vocalist and composer Charmaine Lee. Blending extended vocal techniques, feedback, electronics, and formal rigor, Lee constructs a world that is visceral, dreamlike, and ferociously precise. Drawing from Taoist and Tibetan cosmology, speculative fiction, and performance ritual, Tulpa meditates on embodiment, disembodiment, and sonic multiplicity. Produced by Randall Dunn, the record channels the surreal into stark, physical presence.
TULPA
$32.99
Vinyl
IDEOLOGIC ORGAN
Oct 31, 2025
IDOR200.1
RACHMANINOFF: THE BELLS - ELGAR: FALSTAFF
HARMONIA MUNDI
Available as
CD
$22.49
Nov 14, 2025
To inaugurate their collaboration with harmonia mundi, Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have recorded a program as subtle as it is unexpected, with two seldom-heard masterpieces of 1913. From the bitingly ironical Shakespearian portrait of an ageing knight (Falstaff), to an existential meditation inspired by Poe (The Bells), both these 'literary' scores dramatically prolong the enchantments of a dying romanticism.
Marc-Andre Hamelin - "Found Objects / Sound Objects". Join Marc-Andre Hamelin on a fearless voyage into the extremities of piano music. Music by Frank Zappa, John Cage, Salvatore Martirano, John Oswald, Stefan Wolpe, Yehudi Wyner and Hamelin himself, all pioneers in their approach to the piano. More than any other pianist, Marc-Andre is renowned for winning over listeners with rare and daring repertoire.
Reverie is a soundtrack of atmospheric chamber music for violin, cello, and piano by sisters Rebecca Foon and Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, and marks the first full-length album collaboration between the two players/composers. Reverie melds cellist Rebecca's post-rock and semi-improvised sensibility forged from over two decades playing in DIY/indie bands like Esmerine, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, and Set Fire To Flames, with violinist Aliayta's more recent trajectory from award-winning virtuosic performer to academically-shaped explorations of interdisciplinary composition. Following several years in London at the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music, Aliayta's move to Princeton in 2023 for a Composition PhD put the sisters back on the same continent, regularly meeting and collaborating at Rebecca's Lost River studio in Quebec's Laurentian mountains. Working with co-producer Jace Lasek (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Patrick Watson, The Besnard Lakes), the result is an immersive suite of thematic variations that balances intimacy and detail with wide-spectrum spatial lushness. Subtle electronic interventions and gently blown-out acoustics ebb and flow throughout, further conveying Reverie's overriding mission to weave a meditative pastoralism with the underlying anxiety, sorrow, and tragedy of ecocide.
REVERIE
$31.49
Vinyl
CONSTELLATION
Jun 06, 2025
CNST184.1
EXO
CONSTELLATION
Available as
Vinyl
$31.49
Jun 06, 2025
Mark Molnar has been a linchpin of the Ottawa experimental music scene for over two decades, spanning contemporary classical, electroacoustic, industrial/noise, and improv. As a string player in a wide range of projects, an organizer and curator of innumerable shows, and via his own avantgarde label Black Bough Records, Molnar's unflagging contributions to independent music culture in Canada's capital city have been significant. EXO is his Constellation debut: a remarkable and bracing suite of post-classical composition on which Molnar plays every instrument. Meticulously self-recorded, primarily with strings, harp, and piano, EXO balances thematic melodicism, polytonality, and dissonance across three elegiac pieces of exquisitely expressive dynamism. This is exacting modern chamber music that blends formal and harmonic complexity with a solemn emotive sensibility accessible to a broad audience. Listeners that yearn for some edge and disquietude in a landscape of often all-too-approachable post-classical music should find EXO eminently worth their time and attention. While Molnar is a highly trained string player, and studied music under Aubrey Wolfe, microtonality with James Tenney, and composition with R. Murray Schafer, his trajectory has been entirely and intentionally outside the academy, signalling a socio-artistic commitment to DIY culture, forged from an early passion for the sonic worlds of post-hardcore, post-punk, no-wave, free improv, power electronics, and other independent/underground musics. His classically-informed works have been described as "tense currents of musical modernism invigorated with punk's raw vitality." EXO carries an undercurrent influenced by dark industrial and ambient metal in particular, with microphones purposely placed to pick up the low-end frequencies of the piano body, and of a bass drum positioned as a resonant skin in the acoustic space; an electroacoustic strategy organically meshed to the crisply defined and pristinely recorded pointillisms and polychords of strings, harp, and piano, which feed into this noisefloor of crepuscular sub-bass disquietude and decay. It's a production aesthetic that lends EXO a distinct undertow of tension and feeling, a sort of roiling maximalism where the chamber instrumentation traces arcs and waves of form and flow as if drawn from a dark, impervious ocean below. It also reinforces the profound hermeticism of Molnar's process, as a forbiddingly solitary creative act of immersion and navigation. The album artwork, featuring semiabstract stills of the sea by British photographer Ed Allen, further reifies this metaphor.
EXO
$31.49
Vinyl
CONSTELLATION
Jun 06, 2025
CNST185.1
MOZART: PIANO SONATAS K. 457, 533, 545, 570 & 576
HYPERION
Available as
CD
$23.49
Jun 06, 2025
MOZART: PIANO SONATAS K. 457, 533, 545, 570 & 576
MOZART: PIANO SONATAS K. 457, 533, 545, 570 & 576
$23.49
CD
HYPERION
Jun 06, 2025
HYEN172055.2
PART: AND I HEARD A VOICE
ECM RECORDS
Available as
Vinyl
$30.99
Oct 24, 2025
Vox Clamantis - "Part: And I heard a voice". Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis and their leader Jaan-Eik Tulve have established themselves among the leading interpreters of Arvo Part's music over a quarter-century of close collaboration with the composer - a relationship that builds on the almost half a decade-long artistic partnership between Part and producer Manfred Eicher. 'And I heard a voice' was recorded in Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia and is released as Arvo Part turns 90.
Alexander Melnikov returns to Rachmaninoff with an exploration of the poetic world of the Variations on a Theme by Chopin. He traveled to Lake Lucerne to record this album on the master's own piano at Villa Senar, Rachmaninoff's last summer home. To accompany this eminently lyrical music, he joins forces with luminous soprano Julia Lezhneva and invites us to discover some of the Russian composer's most beautiful songs from this period of intense creative ferment.
The Rite of Spring: Scenes from Pagan Russia in Two Parts. It was Igor Stravinsky who dragged classical music, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. Sure, his contemporaries had paved the way. No longer was the Romantic melody-rich work the dominant force. The new way was about orchestral colors and tone painting. But it was Stravinsky who broke altogether with the Romantic past and created Modernism. It was almost as if all the old rules had not just been bent but completely destroyed. In the modern world, anything goes. Stravinsky made a name for himself at a very early age. In his twenties, his work, Fireworks brought him to the attention of Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballet Russes, who commissioned from Stravinsky a ballet based on the Firebird legend. It was a huge success and Diaghilev commissioned two more. The results were Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring. The story of the premier of The Rite of Spring is famous. The audience was first treated to Les Sylphides, a ballet based on the music of Chopin. The Rite of Spring was to follow. No doubt lulled into a pleasant, dreamy state by the earlier work, and expecting something similarly pastoral with the Rite, named after all about the most pleasant of seasons, they were in for a rude shock. A clue comes from it's subtitle: Scenes from Pagan Russia. It opened with a bassoon bleating way higher than any bassoon was ever supposed to go and then descended into 30 minutes of barbarism and pagan ritual sacrifice. The music was jarring, dissonant, difficult. The huge percussion sections pounded out primitive rhythms, and Nijinsky's provocative choreography challenged the audience's sensibilities. This version was recorded at the Ballroom of the St. George Hotel, Brooklyn, NY, January 5 & 6, 1960 with The Columbia Symphony Orchestra. TRACKLIST: SIDE A: Premier Tableau : L'adoration de la Terre Part 1 - Adoration Of The Earth 1. Introduction 2. Augures Printaniers - Danses Des Adolescentes 3. Jeu Du Rapt 4. Rondes Printanieres 5. Jeu Des Cites Rivales 6. Cortege Du Sage 7. Le Sage 8. Danse de la Terre SIDE B: Second Tableau: Le Sacrifice Part 2 - The Sacrifice 1. Introduction 2. Cercles Mysterieux Des Adolescentes 3. Glorification de L'elue 4. Evocation Des Ancetres 5. Action Rituelle Des Ancetres 6. Danse Sacrale (L'elue)
