- Jean Langlais (1907-1991) was a French composer and organist famous for his sacred music and his role as organist at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Paris. - He was born on 15 February 1907 in La Fontenelle, Brittany, France. He lost his sight when he was only two years old due to untreated glaucoma. His disability did not prevent him from following his passion for music. He attended the National Institute of the Young Blind in Paris, where he studied piano and organ under Andre Marchal, and later the Paris Conservatoire, where he was a student of Marcel Dupre, Paul Dukas and Charles Tournemire. - In 1931, Langlais began teaching at the National Institute of the Young Blind, a position he held until 1976. His career as an organist took a major turn in 1945 when he was appointed titular organist at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre, a position he held until 1987. - Langlais was also a prolific composer. His musical output comprises over 250 works, including masses, motets, organ pieces, and chamber music. His compositional style combines elements of Gregorian, Baroque and modernism, characterized by a strong expressiveness and rich harmonic texture. - This new recording presents Langlais' complete works for trumpet and organ, a happy combination of s strongly melodic and a harmonic instrument. Presented are a set of Chorales, a Sonatina and series of small character pieces. - Played by Nicolas Bernard and Tommaso Mazzoletti, playing the Brondino Vegezzi-Bossi organ at St. Paul protestant church in Gland, Switzerland.

Pianist Olga Pashchenko creates musical narratives with selections from Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words. As children, the two immensely prodigious siblings enjoyed using text to inspire their piano pieces, although which of them was the actual inventor of the genre remains a mystery. It is possible that they either co-created this genre, or even that Fanny could have been the creator of the genre traditionally ascribed exclusively to Felix. This music, although wordless, is bursting with poetry and well-suited to the Conrad Graf piano from 1836 that Pashchenko chose for this recording. The Graf piano, a brand favoured by Felix, has a recitative-like quality that Pashchenko uses to perfectly articulate the poetry inherent in these Lieder ohne Worte or as Fanny called them, Lieder fur das Pianoforte.

Domenico Giuseppe Scarlatti (1685-1757) devoted himself to a single form like no other composer before him. The more than 550 mostly single-movement sonatas for the harpsichord influenced numerous composers throughout the ages, from his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederic Chopin to 21st-century artists such as Georg Katzer. The four selected sonatas K 27, K 213, K 247 and K 268 represent only a small selection of his immensely varied oeuvre and yet they illuminate all the different aspects of his extraordinarily creative composing. Scarlatti himself modestly described many of his sonatas as "Essercizi per gravicembalo". His sonata works contain every conceivable technical challenge, as he himself was one of the most sought-after and virtuoso harpsichordists of his time. Georg Katzer (1935-2019) composed the Five Miniatures in 1971. They are primarily to be understood as gestural music. Although the playing technique is traditional with a few exceptions (the use of the elbows or rolling hands), the miniatures reveal a wealth of ideas in musical forms of expression that evoke the most diverse sensations in a short space of time and space. The work Due to my admiration for D.S. was composed by Georg Katzer in 2001. The close relationship between Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) and her brother Felix Mendelssohn encouraged both siblings throughout their musical careers. And yet, throughout her life, Fanny Hensel fought for even remotely similar recognition of her extraordinary talent as a pianist, conductor and composer. The Four Songs for Pianoforte, Opus 2, are among the few works published by Bote & Bock in 1846 during Fanny Hensel's lifetime.

Roger Eno - "Without Wind, Without Air". The British composer and multi-instrumentalist Roger Eno presents his 3rd solo album with DG. Without Wind, Without Air is an 8-track album featuring orchestral pieces and piano solo tracks, including features by Cecily Eno and a stunning vocal track, composed and sung by Roger Eno himself. Available on vinyl in gatefold jacket.

Michael Finnissy's output for the guitar spans almost 60 years of his career and represents an enormous contribution to the repertoire of the instrument from one of Britain's most significant composers. Published a few days before Finnissy's 80th birthday, this bold and ambitious album celebrates this milestone by bringing together all of his works for solo guitar and guitar ensemble for the first time, in performances by Finnissy's collaborators and led by new music virtuoso and tireless guitar explorer Sam Cave.

The penultimate release in Angela Hewitt's cycle of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas features the Piano Sonata in F minor Op.2 No.1. The listener's understanding is again enhanced by Angela's illuminating booklet notes, in which she sets out her approach to performing these most canonic of works in the entire piano literature.

2023 release. Roger Eno's second solo album for Deutsche Grammophon invites listeners to reflect on the nature of sound and silence. The Skies, They Shift Like Chords. Contains a dozen tracks that express nostalgia for something lost while projecting a sense of something timeless, like the renewal of the seasons or the rise and fall of the breath.

(6th) "Richter's friendship with Prokofiev dated back to their student years, and Prokofiev entrusted him with the premieres of the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas and wrote the Ninth Sonata for him". (7th) "a superb achievement" "a big wartime work... that can easily sound sentimental if played with less elegance than this, and a brilliant final toccata in 7/8 rhythm [Gramophone] (8th) "(the recording) is the Prokofiev 8th Sonata which encompasses breadth and depth in a way none can match"[Penguin Guide3*]"

The titular 'lion of nobility' was (probably) King John II of France, making the most expansive work on this album a lament for a historical event: the French defeat at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Elsewhere, Machaut's protagonist continues to scrutinize the joys and sorrows of courtly love in obsessive detail.

Angela Hewitt's notes for this important new album describe a teenager's moment of revelation when she first came to appreciate the epic masterpiece that is the Liszt Piano Sonata. Here we have a heart-felt recording where this palpable sense of wonder is manifest alongside Hewitt's enthralling technical facility at the keyboard. The program is completed by the second half of Liszt's dazzling second Annee de pelerinage collection: The three Petrarch Sonnets and the noble Dante Sonata, the latter composed as a fund-raiser for the Bonn Beethoven monument in 1839.

Vinyl LP pressing. As well as solo piano pieces, 'the skies: rarities' includes one track for choir and electronics ("Patterned Ground"), and one for string orchestra ("Breaking The Surface"), for which the instrumentalists of Scoring Berlin were asked to both play from the score and improvise. Guitarist Jon Goddard, meanwhile, appears on "Into Silence," giving the track what Eno calls "a particular flavor it would otherwise have lacked."