The viola bastarda is much more than just a specific instrument: it is also a technique for playing the viola da gamba that involves developing a vast skill in ornamentation over the entire range of the instrument and covering all the tessituras from bass to soprano. Today's performers are faced with a repertoire compiled by a few virtuosos, while at the same time they have to reconstitute a performing practice that exists only in a few historical treatises. Manon Papasergio has devoted her first recording to this art form and it's development during the exciting transitional period from the Renaissance to the Baroque.

Pierre Dumoussaud conducts a 'dream orchestra' comprised of chamber music players, regulars at Deauville's Easter Festival (Festival de Paques) in an unusual two-part work by Schonberg: the two "chamber symphonies," scores which are as teeming with detail as they are moving, attesting to the composer's soul-searching and experiences at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. In a string orchestra version, Langsamer Satz by Anton Webern, a student of Schonberg, adds all it's romantic fervour as a counterpoint.

We know Satie as a loner, but it is less well known that Satie had also been in love. He had a brief and stormy affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon. The portrait she made of him is on the cover of this album, as pianist Guillaume Coppola has conceived it as an intimate portrait of the composer, "one masked by a veil of modesty or provocation and which lies between antique and oriental inspiration, mystical phases, humour and cabaret". The miniature Bonjour Biqui and the motif of the Vexations possess rare allusions to Valadon and become commas between these chapters, as does Desespoir agreable, whose title alone seems to sum up Satie's life and work. This tribute is released to mark the centenary of Satie's death; whilst the famous Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes feature on the programme, the album also presents rare and infrequently recorded discoveries that testify to the richness of the works that the whimsical Satie had created.

It is through a double CD that Musique en Wallonie is honoring the Belgian composer Lucie Vellere. When, in 1957, the jury (entirely male) of the International Composition Contest for Women Composers, organised by Grace Spofford and the American division of the Conseil international de femmes, awarded her a first prize, Lucie Vellere found herself, for the first in her life, in the public eye. She who had always cultivated discretion now aroused curiosity. Throughout her fifty-year compositional career, Vellere cultivated an art of the melodic line that one could liken to the curves of Art nouveau, which left their mark on many composers, among them the early Debussy of the Arabesques. While Franck and Faure are often cited as her aesthetic influences, the mature Debussy appears only as filtered through Jongen. Many of the references of pictorial, poetic and musical impressionism were adopted by the composer: the elements (earth, air, fire, water), landscapes, times and seasons (evening, moonlight, autumn), evocations of temporal or spatial distance (an indeterminate past, Antiquity, the Orient). Vellere strove also for a classical sobriety and sense of proportion. This recording highlights the composer's eclectic compositions, mixing work for voice and piano, string quartets and octets, women's choir and even piano music, a panorama of her compositions that will reveal several facets of her personality.

Terra Nova, the second opus in the Poema series, explores themes of the search for meaning and the human experience. Alexander Shelley offers an interpretation of Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra that highlights the fragile balance between light and darkness, knowledge and mystery, inspired by Nietzsche's eponymous book. Canadian composer Ian Cusson's work, 1Q84: Sinfonietta Metamoderna, resonates with Strauss' work by drawing parallels between the world views of the German author and Japanese author Haruki Murakami, writer of the novel 1Q84. The National Arts Centre Orchestra delivers a performance that transcends music to reflect on our humanity.

Johann Sebastian Bach, though largely unaffected by the trends of his time, reimagined many older forms with striking originality, shaping the course of Western music. Among his innovations is the sonata for a melodic instrument (such as the viola da gamba) and obbligato harpsichord, where both parts engage in equal dialogue-a model later expanded by his sons and composers like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Following their acclaimed first album dedicated to Corelli's Sonatas Op. 5, Teodoro Bau and Andrea Buccarella now present their second duo recording: the Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord by J.S. Bach, each revealing a unique stylistic approach within a unified form.

The Minnesota Orchestra and it's music director Thomas Sondergard delve into the imaginative world of Thomas Ades, a singular voice in contemporary classical music. Featuring two of his most compelling orchestral works, The Exterminating Angel Symphony - a world premiere recording - and the Violin Concerto, this album captures Ades' uncanny ability to merge intellectual rigor with raw emotional immediacy. With orchestral textures both radiant and unsettling, Ades evokes a surreal musical landscape, brought vividly to life by Sondergard's incisive direction and violinist Leila Josefowicz's electrifying performance. Highlighting two distinct sides of Ades' artistry, cinematic drama and virtuosic intimacy, this recording explores the composer's breadth with striking clarity. Josefowicz brings fierce expressivity and precision to the Violin Concerto, while the orchestra navigates the volatile energy of The Exterminating Angel Symphony with gripping intensity. This album also marks the PENTATONE debut of the Minnesota Orchestra, Thomas Sondergard, and Leila Josefowicz.

Giacomo Puccini achieved global renown as an opera composer, but the choral, vocal and orchestral works recorded here reveal little-known aspects of his output, including several rarities. Puccini's early training was in church music, with the Messa di Gloria a clear indication of his great talent. The recently discovered Preludio a orchestra shows his wider ambitions, with the Germanic influences of the Capriccio sinfonico resulting in music destined to reappear in operas such as La Boheme. The elegiac and prescient aria Ad una morta contrasts with the celebratory Inno a Roma, a rousing occasional piece that features plenty of Puccini's characteristic melodic flourishes. A digital EP of the Preludio sinfonico and the Requiem is also available for download and streaming (9.70398)

Claudio Santoro's late works are marked by great concision and considerable emotional density. The music on this album was written in the last months of his life. The Viola Concerto and the Concerto for Chamber Orchestra juxtapose restless energy and expansive - if at times desolate - lyricism. The powerful Symphony No. 13 shows Santoro's mastery of orchestration and form at it's peak, and the compact Symphony No. 14 was to be the last in a cycle widely acclaimed as the most significant of it's kind ever composed in Brazil.

Sir Georg Solti was a frequent guest conductor with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Born in Hungary in 1912, he played a decisive role in rebuilding the Bavarian National Theatre after the war. From the 1960s onwards, he was considered one of the world's leading conductors alongside Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. Georg Solti returned to Munich once more for a special concert on February 10, 1984, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz. Aged 71 and at the height of his career, he conducted excerpts from Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. Works by these two Russian composers, as well as Bruckner and Mahler, suited him particularly well, as they sounded musically spirited and exceptionally transparent. Prokofiev's three-act ballet Romeo and Juliet was written in 1935 for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, but it's premiere did not take place until 1938, in Brno in the Czech Republic. At the special concert in Munich in 1984 with Georg Solti, fifteen numbers from the ballet music were performed in chronological order. Pyotr Tchaikovsky dedicated his Fourth Symphony - composed in 1877/78 at the same time as his opera Eugene Onegin - to his patron Nadezhda von Meck. Despite their lengthy correspondence, they never actually met. In a letter to her dated March 1878, Tchaikovsky outlined the feelings he had experienced while composing his Fourth Symphony, though no specific programme can be discerned from them.

An award-winning English composer of international standing, and one of the leading composers of his generation, whose music has been performed, recorded, and broadcast in many countries, Edward Gregson celebrates his eightieth birthday in 2025. He continues to compose and perform as actively as ever. This album presents three major concertos, interspersed with two shorter works for piano and orchestra. A Song for Bram was written in memory of his great friend and advocate, the conductor Bramwell Tovey. A Song for Sue, re-working the central Nocturne from his Concertante for Piano and Brass Band (1966), is a 2024 tribute to his wife. One of the most performed of all his works, the Tuba Concerto was written for John Fletcher, who gave the first performance in 1977. Gregson's Concerto for Viola and String Orchestra 'Three Goddesses' was given it's first performance in 2023 by Rachel Roberts. The goddesses depicted in the three movements are Morrigan (Celtic warrior queen and earth mother), Aphrodite (Greek goddess of love and beauty), and Diana (Roman goddess of the hunt). First performed by these forces in 2020, the Oboe Concerto 'A Vision in a Dream' is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. In following the narrative, Gregson comes closest in his series of concertos to producing a descriptive symphonic poem.

Electrifying debut album from a bold new voice in classical piano. British pianist Ophelia Gordon makes a striking debut with this album of works by Nikolai Kapustin, the Soviet composer whose music fuses the harmonic language and rhythmic drive of jazz with the formal precision of classical composition. Though Kapustin's music sounds improvised, every note is meticulously written - jazz in spirit, but classical in structure. Gordon brings rare authenticity to this repertoire, having tracked down long out-of-print vinyl recordings of Kapustin's own performances in a personal search for the composer's true voice. The programme is carefully curated to offer a compelling listening arc, capturing Kapustin's wit, lyricism, and fire with both intimacy and flair. Recorded on a characterful 1961 Steinway D, the album's sound is warm, immediate, and rich in detail - engineered with a microphone setup designed to balance the immediacy of a jazz trio with the depth and clarity of classical solo piano. This release marks two milestones: the first full Kapustin album by a British female pianist, and the first classical album by a BRIT School alum. With a growing reputation for fearless artistry and cross-genre fluency, Gordon offers a vital new perspective on one of the most original piano voices of the 20th century.

Jozef Wieniawski, younger brother of Henryk, was a prolific Polish composer and virtuoso pianist renowned throughout Europe. After studies in Paris he spent two years in Weimar studying with and absorbing the compositional style of Franz Liszt - Wieniawski's work combines the pianistic flair and poetic intensity of both Liszt and his fellow countryman Chopin. These qualities can all be heard in the virtuoso Polonaises and the tragic Ballade as well as the Piano Sonata in B minor - the pinnacle of Jozef Wieniawski's many contributions to the piano repertoire. Andrew Cannestra's recording of Polonaise No. 1 is available for streaming and download on a digital single (9.70388).

Richard Strauss described his two-act opera 'Intermezzo' as a 'bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes'. The soprano role of Christine with her shimmering cantilenas represents Strauss's wife Pauline, while the successful Court Conductor Robert Storch is Richard Strauss's alter ego in a reality drama that was avant-garde for it's time. This acclaimed production from director Tobias Kratzer brings 'Intermezzo' into the present day, highlighting Strauss's own clever switches between reality and fiction with stunning visual effects and a superbly characterful cast.

This album comprises nine solo and chamber compositions written over a span of more than fifty years. Although none of these pieces uses any Asian instruments, most of them contain some kind of Asian cultural references. All of them were composed for the performers who have recorded them. __ David Loeb