A new choral album of radiant melody and profound reflection Composer James Woodhall presents�Full of Grace, a deeply expressive new choral album that moves between the intimate and the exultant. Drawing inspiration from sacred texts, ancient prayers, and moments of divine revelation, this collection weaves together contemporary choral writing with timeless spiritual themes. The album opens with the title track,�Full of Grace, a lyrical meditation on the Angel Gabriel's greeting to Mary and the incarnation. With warm harmonies and a memorable, flowing melody, the piece captures both the stillness and the awe of that encounter, while it's vibrant central section echoes the heavenly proclamation to the shepherds. At the heart of the album lies�The Damascus Sequence�- an 11-movement cantata chronicling Saul's dramatic conversion from persecutor to preacher, drawn closely from Acts 9. This narrative arc, from darkness to vision, turmoil to peace, is vividly painted in choral textures, duets, and solos. Tracks such as�Murderous Threats,�I am Jesus, and�Saul Sees and is Saved�reflect Woodhall's gift for text-setting and storytelling through music, bringing ancient scripture to life with a keen sense of pacing and atmosphere. Later in the album, Woodhall returns to the Nativity in�The Shepherds' Carol, a haunting and intimate new text that juxtaposes pastoral imagery with celestial wonder. His setting of�Ave Verum Corpus�and�Ave Maria�offers fresh interpretations of these enduring texts, while the final track,�Light from Light, closes the album with a vision of hope and illumination - a reflection on divine presence in the world. Rooted in the choral tradition yet unmistakably contemporary,�Full of Grace�is a compelling addition to the sacred repertoire. It's accessible yet distinctive language will resonate with listeners who appreciate the choral music of James MacMillan, John Tavener, and Morten Lauridsen. For broadcasters, curators, and critics,�Full of Grace�offers music that is both spiritually resonant and musically rewarding - ideal for sacred seasons, reflective programming, and those seeking new choral music that speaks with clarity and depth.

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir/Jean S�bastien Vall�ee -"Remember: 130 Years of Canadian Choral Music" / 2024 marks the 130th anniversary of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, one of Canada's oldest, largest and most recognized choral ensembles. Currently under the direction of Jean-S�bastien Vall�e, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is proud to celebrate it's anniversary with the release of the album, Remember. Many of the works featured on this double CD set are pieces of Canadian choral music history that have a symbolic or special meaning for the choir. Virgin Music Group; Virgin Music International; Classical

To mark the 100th anniversary of the death of the Irish-born composer Charles Wood (1866 - 1926), SOMM Recordings is honoured to release his String Quartet No. 2 'Highgate' and String Quartet No. 4 'Harrogate' along with his Variations On an Irish Folk Tune. This follows SOMM's 2024 release of Wood's sixth and last String Quartet in a performance by the London Chamber Ensemble Quartet [SOMMCD 0692], which received a stunning review in The Observer, BBC Music Magazine, MusicWeb International, Klassik. Com and The Strad, and was a Gramophone recommended recording. Featured again on this album, the London Chamber Ensemble was formed in 2019 and is led by violinist Madeleine Mitchell. The ensemble has been praised for it's "high quality chamber music-making" (Musical Opinion) and it's "passionate and persuasive advocacy [and] gripping interpretations" (Gramophone. ) Charles Wood was born into a family of singers and musicians in Armagh, Ireland. He sang in the cathedral choir, became a student organist, and gained experience as a string player, particularly as a violist. By the time he was sixteen, Wood had begun to write chamber music. When, in 1883, he became one of fifty inaugural class members of the Royal College of Music-to study composition under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Hubert Parry-he had composed at least one movement of a string quartet. By April 1885, he had completed his String Quartet No. 1. Two years after acquiring his degrees in 1890, Wood composed a second string quartet, which he nicknamed the 'Highgate,' (It seems that he drew the name from visits to see his brother, William, who was the music master at Highgate Grammar School. ) While a little reminiscent of Brahms, the string quartet does point to Wood's emerging individuality. The unusual third movement, for instance, makes use of a seven-bar ground bass coupled with an austere theme for his own instrument, the viola. In 1898, Wood married compatriot Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford. �When she was taking the waters in the famous Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate in August 1912, he completed his Fourth Quartet-hence the nickname. Wood's personal voice is evident in this quartet partly through his use of Irish folk melodies and dance tunes as thematic material; as in the captivating reel-like rondo theme of his finale, which is based on one of the Irish Melodies�by the Irish writer Thomas Moore. A frequent source for many of Wood's Irish arrangements was Old Irish Folk Music and Songs�(1909). His scintillating Variations on an Irish Folk Tune, dating from 25 August 1916, were based on Melody No. 749 of the 842�melodies in the collection.

Since relaunching Sinfonia of London in 2018, John Wilson's hand-picked orchestra has attracted the highest critical acclaim from both national and international press, performed at the BBC Proms every year since 2021 (their live d�but), and made their international d�but at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam in 2025. Regularly touring in the UK, they have also released 25 albums (this is the 26th), covering a wide range of repertoire, including works by Korngold, Respighi, Ravel, Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Britten, Walton, Bliss, and Rodgers & Hammerstein. The album opens with Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice, followed by Debussy's Clair de lune (orchestrated by John Wilson). Chabrier's Joyeuse Marche and Ravel's Une Barque sur l'oc�an (orchestrated by their composers) are followed by Saint-Sa�ns' symphonic poem Danse macabre. The programme ends with all of the movements from Bizet's two Carmen Suites, but in John Wilson's preferred order!

Kirnberger Symphoes: World Premiere Recordings "His early acquaintance with the great school of Sebastian Bach, as well as his perspicacity, which enabled him to discover at an early stage the depth and incalculable richness in the works of this great master, unfathomable to so many others, and which had endeared him to this school, an institution which also demanded high precision and refinement in it's practice, something far more difficult to achieve than the glittering lustre of more recently founded schools, as well as for the harmonic part of the art, which it's master fathomed and exhausted as no one before him had ever done, all the more passionately and exclusively, since nature seemed to have denied him the delicate feeling for melodic beauty." - AMZ III, December 1800, p. 506

These late works by Brahms are like a testament. But what is this secretive man revealing to us here? Or rather, what is he still trying to hide? Hiding it until the very end, arousing in us an irresistible desire to guess what it is? Perhaps that is where the beauty of these scores lies. - Piotr Anderzewski. A short album, a selection of jewels from Brahms' Late Piano works (Op. 116 to 119, with Op. 119 No.4 being the last piano piece Brahms ever wrote) presented in a carefully chosen order. Op. 116 to 118 represent the composer's late piano works, written during the final decade of his life. Here we find a more mature, intimate and subtle Brahms, far removed from the roaring Romanticism of his earlier works.

An ArkivMusic Exclusive in North America! This special edition book with inserted CD presents Dacapo Records’ complete EMP Series with the electronic music of Else Marie Pade. The series offers a fresh perspective on Pade’s music, featuring previously unavailable works, including reel-to-reel tapes, compositions from her tenure at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and new digitised versions of pioneering works. The book includes a large collection of texts about her electronic works, with QR codes to the corresponding digital albums in Dacapo Records’ EMP Series and a CD with five selected electronic works.

A MusicWeb International Recording of the Month!

This is a marvellous new B Minor Mass and it is, without a doubt, the most French-sounding version of the piece to have yet come my way.

That might sound like a lazy stereotype. After all, it’s performed by that most renowned Francophile among musicians, William Christie, who has dedicated his life to rehabilitating the French Baroque and whose efforts have meant that names such as Lully, Rameau, Charpentier and Marais have been not only rescued from their specialist niche but have been given an uncontested place among the concert programmes of the Anglo-Saxons. With his ensemble Les Arts Florissants he has become one of the greatest champions of that music, so it’s hardly surprising that some of the interpretative dust of the French Baroque should rub off onto his Bach.

It’s not just a trope to describe his Bach as Gallic, however. It’s there right from the start. The opening Kyrie is the most mellifluous and honeyed I have heard since the advent of historical performance practice. The two great fugues proceed with cultured smoothness that sounds as though they have one eyebrow perpetually raised. It’s a sound of which, I suspect, Lutheran Bach would have profoundly disapproved. I rather liked it, however, and as a change from what has become the norm of period practice I found it very effective.

That’s only one example of one of the performance’s wider traits. Throughout, it has an elegance, an élan, a nonchalance, almost, that would make them seem entirely at home if performed in the court of ancien regime Versailles. The solos with their instrumental obligatti, for example, sound refined and polished in a manner that is a hundred miles away from the church and more from the realm of the theatre. There’s nothing wrong with that, though, and it’s in keeping with Christie’s vision. My favourites included Katherine Watson in the Laudamus te, with a wonderfully dusky violin, and André Morsch’s playful combat with the horn in the Quoniam. Tim Mead’s lovely countertenor is a repeated highlight, be it slotting into Watson’s soprano in the Christe or sustaining a blisterinly poignant Agnus Dei at the end.

Not only are the orchestral and instrumental playing super throughout, but the choral singing is top notch, too. That, however, will come as no surprise to those how know and love the work of Les Arts Florissants, and it’s great to hear them tackling one of the central works of the German repertoire. It’s a Teutonic world that they can’t be too practised in, but they bring something remarkably distinctive to it.

The main reason for the performance’s success, however, is Christie himself. Bringing his lifetime’s experience to the B Minor Mass must, surely, have been a labour of love rather than an expectation, and the results are wonderful. There is majesty aplenty in the Gloria, whose opening casts off the mellifluousness of the preceding Kyrie as though emerging into a new light, producing rumbustious, gloriously winning tone that brought a broad grin to my face, as did the outer bookends of the Credo. The Sanctus is taken at a rapid pace, with brilliantly detailed violin inflections to enliven the texture, and the final Dona nobis pacem is brilliantly paced.

Perhaps the highlight of the work is the Easter sequence, however, and, in particular, the Crucifixus. Here you get the unmistakeable whiff of the Opéra, because Christie slows down the pace and stresses the beat with what comes close to string (and voice) sforzandi in a way that surely mimics the nails being repeatedly battered into Christ’s suffering body. It’s this movement that will tell you whether this performance is for you. Some might find it vulgar or too overtly theatrical. I thought it wonderful, an example of the conductor using his experience in the theatre to enlighten and deepen his vision of Bach.

Choose for yourself, but I thought this the most memorable B Minor Mass to have come my way since the (entirely different) performance from John Butt and the Dunedin Consort. Explore it and be surprised.

– MusicWeb International (Simon Thompson)

Having worked extensively with period instrument ensembles throughout my career, I was intrigued and fascinated about the possibility on this album of a delicious colliding of the two worlds. Alison Balsom. On this new recording Alison Balsom and her long term friend and conductor Trevor Pinnock bring alive works from Telemann, H�ndel, Vivaldi, Albinoni and Marcello. A baroque album, confronting the period instruments of the Pinnock Players and Alison's use of a modern instrument: a rotary valve piccolo trumpet. Alison comments: "The piccolo trumpet is a modern invention - something that Bach and his contemporaries could not have known was to come - it's power, it's gleaming bright tone and it's 20th century engineering technology. And this instrument is a world away from the subtle multifaceted sounds of the natural trumpet of the Baroque era. That said, the opportunity to perform much more chromatic and virtuosic music such as that originally written for solo violin or oboe, has seduced me and my trumpet colleagues since the days of the great Maurice Andr�. He showed the world how intensely sweet the piccolo trumpet could be in it's upper register".

The first in a new cycle of Dvor�k symphony recordings, Dvor�k: Symphonies 5 & 6 is the second release from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and it's Chief Conductor and Artistic Advisor, Jaime Mart�n, on the MSO's own record label. Recorded in 2023 at Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne, these performances-under Concertmasters Dale Barltrop (Symphony No.5) and Tair Khisambeev (Symphony No.6)-were artistic highlights of the MSO's second season under Mart�n's baton. The artwork approach to the MSO's Dvor�k cycle profiles iconic scenes from across Melbourne and the state of Victoria, beginning with the Twelve Apostles of the Great Ocean Road, a day trip from Hamer Hall.

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Songbook is the title of French clarinetist Pierre G�nisson's new album, recorded with pianist Bruno Fontaine, and several surprising guests. Featuring a laid-back mix of repertoire taken from the American Songbook and from French popular repertoire. Terrific lineup of artists includes Monica Bellucci on "I Got You Under My Skin", Lambert Wilson on "My Funny Valentine", Thibaut Garcia on Salvador's "Syracuse" and on "Smile", Youn Sun Nah in "La Javanaise", Kimberose on "What A Wonderful World".

Shirley Horn's sensitive vocals and sublime yet powerful piano playing attracted the attention of fellow musicians, including early supporter Miles Davis, and numerous in-the-know fans during her decades-long career. This collection of recordings, made for Verve Records during her late-career resurgence, includes performances with small groups and a string orchestra.

Jeneba Kanneh-Mason/Chineke! Orchestra - "Florence Price"In the year of Florence Price's 70th anniversary, the Chineke! Orchestra and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason celebrate the composer's legacy with two of her landmark award-winning pieces which led to her major breakthroughs as a composer.

From the mid-1810s until the end of his life, Beethoven constantly tested to the limit the forms he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart. His last two cello sonatas bear witness to this structural preoccupation, which opened up so many new spaces, as did the final sets of Bagatelles, which are as disconcerting as they are innovative. Two genres shrewdly linked by Andreas Staier and Roel Dieltiens in these interpretations, in which eloquence merges with historically informed performance practice.

MEDITATION - Classical Favourites for Relaxing and Dreaming

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Busoni: Arlecchino

Indulge yourself with some pure, unabashed nostalgia. This collection of 31 old-timey tunes – all cheerful, charming and upbeat – is a guaranteed cure for the blues. Featuring a genuine Band Organ (Style 165), selections include “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Beer Barrel Polka,” “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” and “Bye Bye Blackbird.” (Klavier)