Unspoken explores the piano-duet repertoire as a space of intimacy and shared imagination. Pianists Wu Qian and Juho Pohjonen present a program that moves between intimate lyricism and virtuosic display, centred on works for piano four hands. At it's heart are the two major duets by Felix Mendelssohn, framed by a striking rediscovery: the Sonata in F major by Sophia Maria Westenholz, whose bold harmonic language and orchestral sweep bridge Classical clarity and early Romantic ambition. The program is completed by the characterful four-hand writing of C�cile Chaminade and Amy Beach, offering contrasting worlds of colour, scene and poetic miniature. Recorded with warmth and clarity, Unspoken reflects the piano duet at it's most intimate: two musicians sharing a single instrument.

Maksimal brings together three major works by Daniel Temkin, music shaped by vivid physical images and a search for the forces that connect experience, memory, and place. At it's center is the violin concerto Maksimal, written for and performed here by Francisco Fullana with Ryan McAdams and the Maksimal Ensemble. Bright, agile, and rhythmically charged, the three movements balance solo virtuosity with quicksilver ensemble dialogue, nodding to Baroque concerto principles while stretching them into larger, continuous arcs. Dreamed Landscapes turns to the piano, with Ryan MacEvoy McCullough tracing three impressionistic studies inspired by galaxies, glaciers, and canyon horizons. Rather than literal depiction, the music focuses on colour, resonance, and the inner sensation of inhabiting these spaces. Completing the program is Ocean's Call, performed by the Aizuri Quartet, a work inspired by California's Pacific coast. From misty harmonics and brittle wind textures to expansive, storm-driven waves, the piece unfolds as a meditation on nature's power and calm. Recorded across Houston and New York, Maksimal is Temkin's second solo album on Orchid Classics: a focused, immersive portrait of a composer drawn to sound as landscape, motion, and shared human experience.

The myth of Orlando Furioso, conceived by Ludovico Ariosto in the 16th century, is one of the most fertile for dramatic and musical imagination. Between chivalrous heroism, romantic torment and psychological turmoil, it explores the limits of passion and the fractures of the human soul, offering Baroque composers an ideal terrain for expressing the tension between reason and madness, order and chaos. This program bears witness to this, traversing the many faces of Orlando through excerpts from operas by Vivaldi, Handel, Steffani, Fux and Porpora, where recitatives, arias and instrumental movements mirror his inner world.

Both accomplished musicians based in Bayreuth, Anna Bon and Wilhelmine von Bayreuth devoted a significant part of their output to the flute, the instrument of choice of Frederick II. Their sonatas reveal a marked taste for bold harmonies and a remarkable sense of invention. Several decades earlier, �lisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre had already dazzled the court of Louis XIV with her violin sonatas, described by the Sun King as "very beautiful" and above all "original, a quality found all too rarely today." Too rarely performed, these works find in Marta Gawlas, in her first solo album, a sensitive and inspired interpretation, fully equal to their uniqueness and poetic depth.

For the third volume of their Schubert 200 series, Samuel Hasselhorn and Ammiel Bushakevitz celebrate the composer's refound exuberance. After the sunlit summer of 1825, 1826 was a year of renewal for Schubert, bringing an astounding rush of artistic energy. These Lieder, pitched between nostalgia and quiet confidence, sing of a hope transcending the vagaries of life.

Gianandrea Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra present a gripping new recording of Samuel Barber's Vanessa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American opera of love, longing, and illusion. In Barber's atmospheric, emotionally charged score, echoes of Verdi, Puccini, and Hitchcock-era Hollywood intertwine with a distinctly modern American voice. This performance brings together an exceptional cast, including Nicole Heaston, J'Nai Bridges, Matthew Polenzani, Susan Graham, and Thomas Hampson, who illuminate Gian Carlo Menotti's haunting tale of desire across generations. Recorded live in concert, this release captures Vanessa's sweeping romanticism and psychological depth with vivid orchestral color and extraordinary vocal artistry. A landmark addition to the contemporary operatic discography, it reveals why Vanessa remains one of the 20th century's most compelling operas.

Undreamed Shores brings together three major contemporary string quartets written for and performed by the Jupiter String Quartet, works the ensemble has lived with in performance over many years. In To Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores, Michi Wiancko traces a sequence of vividly imagined musical scenes inspired by the natural world. Across seven concise movements, the music reflects on fragility, ecological loss, and kinship, gradually moving toward a quietly hopeful call for collective responsibility. Composed during the pandemic, Stephen Andrew Taylor's Chaconne/Labyrinth is built around a repeating harmonic cycle, using just intonation to evoke the tension of being caught between stasis and searching. Familiar material continually returns, reshaped by a sense of uncertainty before leading toward clarity. Completing the album, Kati Agocs's Imprimatur (String Quartet No. 2) unfolds as a continuous rhapsodic meditation. Musical ideas are repeatedly transformed, moving between darkness and light, and culminating in a serene, luminous conclusion. Together, these works form a thoughtful exploration of contemporary quartet writing, each offering space to reflect on our shared humanity and to find moments of hope and light in challenging times.

Following the international success of PLANET, LETTER, and NOCHE, Sofiane Pamart returns with MOVIE, his most ambitious and deeply personal solo album to date, conceived as the first "film" he has ever scored himself. Spanning 20 tracks, the album marks a major artistic turning point, blending intimate piano compositions with cinematic scale and featuring the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra alongside 14 international collaborators including Wyclef Jean, Celeste, SIA, J Balvin, Nelly Furtado, FKJ, and others. MOVIE reflects Pamart's evolution into a defining figure in contemporary piano music, underscored by over one billion global streams, mastering by Grammy winner Matt Colton, landmark performances such as the Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony, and historic achievements including selling out Accor Arena, an upcoming Stade de France performance, and high-profile collaborations ranging from Formula 1's Charles LeClerc to global pop and hip-hop icons.

LEFTOVERS

In the Renaissance and Baroque eras Seville, already a cultural melting pot, became Spain's principal port for the routes to South America. Named after the twelve-sided 'golden' tower that dominates the River Guadilquivir in Seville, La Torre del Oro, is the latest album from Christina Pluhar's ensemble L'Arpeggiata. Tracing and mixing the musical cross-currents that run between Spain and Central and South America - Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Chile - it takes the 1500s as the starting point for a captivating journey that reaches the modern day. For La Torre del Oro singers C�line Scheen, Luciana Mancini and Vincenzo Capezzuto join the 13 instrumentalists of L'Arpeggiata, led by Christina Pluhar on the theorbo. Among the other instruments to be heard are baroque guitar and harp, Venezuelan cuatro and harp, cornetto, harpsichord, accordion and maracas.

The complete Westminster recordings by ARTUR RODZINSKI date were made in London and Vienna from 1954 to 1958. While they represent a true autocrat of the podium, Rodzinski drew from orchestras every last ounce of energy as well as cultivating their virtuoso talents. Most recordings in this set appear internationally for the first time, together with some (previously unpublished) rehearsal extracts. Like his colleagues and fellow emigres Fritz Reiner, George Szell and Arturo Toscanini, Artur Rodzinski did not seek to make friends in the process of making music. His rehearsal methods were as ruthless as his conducting style was fiercely driven. His caustic manner extended to fellow professionals in the business such as soloists and agents, and the new essay by James H. North for this Eloquence collection includes stories of his dictatorial behaviour. But then Rodzinski's musical values also represent another era, and he drew from orchestras every last ounce of energy as well as cultivating their virtuoso talents. Once he had emigrated to the US, Rodzinski played an instrumental role in making the Cleveland and Chicago Symphony orchestras into the superbly responsive ensembles for which they are world-renowned today. Having retired from the stress of directorships, in the mid-1950s and in variable health, he produced a remarkable Indian summer of recordings for the Westminster label. Made mostly in London between 1954 and his death in November 1958, these Westminster albums centred on the late-Romantic and early-20th-century repertoire which responds to a virtuoso conductor's concern for subtle orchestral colours and extremes of speed and dynamic: Mussorgsky Pictures, Kod�ly Dances and Richard Strauss's tone-poems. Rodzinski plays insightful accompanist to piano concertos with Paul Badura-Skoda, Youri Boukoff and J�rg Demus, but he achieved a special affinity with Erica Morini in the violin concertos of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Rodzinski's decades of experience in the theatre bring sweeping authority to 'bleeding chunks' of Wagner, suites of Bizet and Tchaikovsky ballets. Further highlights in this set of newly-remastered mono and stereo albums include a Shostakovich Fifth which testifies to Rodzinski's early commitment to the composer in the West. Other, enduringly robust interpretations of canon symphonies include Dvorak's Ninth, Prokofiev's First, Tchaikovsky Nos. 4-6, and his very last Westminster album, of Beethoven and Schubert. At the end of the sessions, Rodzinski thanked the orchestra in a speech which was captured for posterity and reissued here. More rarities unearthed especially for this set include several rehearsal sequences, capturing Rodzinski's inimitable manner and dedication to his craft.

The complete Decca recordings of German conductor Horst Stein cover an astonishingly wide range of repertoire, with Friedrich Gulda in the 'very spontaneous, very lyrical Beethoven concerto cycle' (Gramophone), through music by Cherubini and Weber, to critically-acclaimed recordings of Bruckner, Wagner and Wolf. Included are four discs of his colourful Sibelius: 'free-wheeling readings of great thrust, drive and a big line... The sound is at once biting and smooth' wrote High Fidelity. The complete Decca recordings of a Horst Stein, directed with the unfussy authority of his many appearances at Bayreuth and the Vienna State Opera. The recordings in this set, cover an astonishingly broad range of repertoire. Beethoven concertos (with Friedrich Gulda, once a staple of the Decca catalogue), Cherubini, Prokofiev, Bruckner, Sibelius: all writing in completely contrasting idioms, and yet all brought stylishly to life here under the baton of Horst Stein. Stein learnt his craft as an opera conductor in postwar Bayreuth, where he served as an assistant to Karajan, Keilberth and Knappertsbusch in celebrated performances of the Ring and Parsifal. He later became known for the expert pacing and dramatic pulse of his own Wagner conducting, which is represented in this set by an album of orchestral highlights with the Vienna Philharmonic. Stein worked in Bayreuth and Vienna throughout his career, and later in life became a revered figure in Japan. He represented the best of the German Kapellmeister tradition, which produced straightforwardly eloquent and powerful performances of whatever music was at hand. When Stein conducted Bruckner - the Second and Sixth, again recorded in Vienna - he sounded like a natural Brucknerian. When he recorded Sibelius - four albums of tone poems and the Second Symphony from Geneva - he sounded like a complete Sibelian, and so on. As an addendum to his Decca output comes an album of Russian opera arias with the bass Kim Borg recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. Just as Stein lends noble support to Borg in the Death Scene from Boris Godunov, he is a detailed accompanist to Josef Siv� in violin concertos by Glazunov and Prokofiev, and to Friedrich Gulda in the piano concertos of Beethoven. Horst Stein's conducting will impress many modern listeners with it's rhythmic power and lack of ego, and this set is the most comprehensive survey of his legacy on record ever issued.

Embracing the whole world, Mahler's Symphony No. 3 is a vast fresco in which nature, man and the spiritual interact on a cosmic scale. Directing the combined forces of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Chorus and Tiffin Boys' Choir, and with the movingly expressive voice of Hanna Hipp, Vasily Petrenko reveals all the richness of this visionary peak of Post-Romanticism.

For three decades Alexandre Tharaud and Jean-Guihen Queyras have shared their rich and rare musical friendship with harmonia mundi. From Marin Marais to Debussy and Berg via Schuber, this anniversary double-album brings together some of their finest recordings. For the occasion they have also recorded several new pieces, including the Britten Sonata, Faur�'s �l�gie, and Weill's Youkali.

Hungarian Pictures presents recordings of music by Liszt, Bart�k, Kod�ly and Dohn�nyi in recordings of native authority, many of them making their first appearance on CD. J�nos Ferencsik and Gy�rgy Lehel were leading orchestras who knew their style intimately, and who had the Hungarian rhythms of this music flowing in their blood. In the 1960s, Deutsche Grammophon and the Westminster label introduced listeners to much fascinating Hungarian repertoire which they had never previously encountered. This Eloquence set of 'Hungarian Connections' gathers up these rare recordings for the first time and reissues them in newly remastered versions with original covers. A booklet essay by Peter Quantrill explores the careers of the two principal musicians leading the music-making on the set, J�nos Ferencsik and Gy�rgy Lehel. These were both conductors who did not flee Hungary when the revolution was so brutally suppressed by the Communists in 1956. Accordingly, they came to play a central role in musical culture in postwar Budapest, with Ferencsik based at the Opera and Lehel at the Radio and TV company. Ferencsik and Lehel were leading orchestras who knew their style intimately, and who had the Hungarian rhythms of this music flowing in their blood: Ferencsik remarked that he performed Bart�k's music as naturally as if he were breathing. No less compelling is the single album issued by DG of Kodaly conducting his own music, which introduced the shimmeringly evocative tone-poem Summer Evening to many western listeners. Finally, there is a single LP of highlights from the 1961 Liszt-Bartok Piano Competition, held in Budapest: the winner G�bor Gabos gives a thunderously eloquent account of Liszt's Piano Sonata, and there are further performances by the young Dino Ciani, Valentin Belchenko and David Wilde. Hungarian Connections is a feast of rare recordings which no collector will want to miss.

Elements explores the distinctive sound world of saxophone and harp in a program that moves between Baroque masterworks and newly commissioned music inspired by the four classical elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Performed by saxophonist Huw Wiggin and harpist Oliver Wass, the album places Bach, Purcell, Vivaldi and Couperin alongside contemporary works written specially for the duo. Each commission reflects a different elemental idea, from the luminous textures of Charlotte Harding's Euphotic to the volatile energy of Laura Bowler's Caesium and the wind-driven virtuosity of David Wallace's blowing A gale. Interwoven throughout are inventive arrangements of Baroque works, drawing subtle connections across centuries. The pairing of saxophone and harp creates a sound palette that is intimate and richly coloured, capable of lyric stillness and brilliant display. Praised for his "liquid gold tones" by The Times, Wiggin joins forces with leading harpist Oliver Wass in a programme that moves between reflection, drama and radiant beauty.

This album aims to highlight one of the instruments that Barrios loved and played most, his Francisco Simplicio guitar, made in 1927. The selected pieces underline the main musical directions that stand out within the vast repertoire linked to Barrios, also making reference to the works of authors that he used to perform and who therefore had a voice on this instrument, like Chopin, Bach or Tarrega.

The Curious Bards immerse us in the 18th-century popular music of Ireland and Scotland, with reels, jigs, songs and dances that circulated in the oral tradition and in print, from the airs of Turlough O'Carolan to the great collections of the period. Impelled by an irresistible energy and underpinned by historical research, this album restores the vitality of this music that lives for the dance, for the preservation of folk memory, and for sharing with others.

Schumann is one of the great lifelong companions for musicians, including, Dasol Kim. The composer manages, with remarkable subtlety, to capture the fleeting yet striking moments and emotions of existence. His Carnaval, the Forest Scenes, and his final composition, the Geistervariationen ("Ghost Variations"), dedicated to Clara and first published in 1939, contain numerous references to popular imagination, literature, Schumann's life, and his reflections - all of which Dasol Kim explores here.

Juliette Hurel and Isabelle Moretti present an inspired selection of French music for flute and harp, featuring key masterpieces alongside some rare delights. From the intensely vocal melodic line of Faur� and Debussy's playful exploration of timbres and resonances to the subtly sculpted writing of Jean Cras, this recital highlights the virtuosity and expressive verve of a duo of great stylistic finesse.

The Chevalier de Saint-George is in many respects an exceptional figure. Born in Guadeloupe in the eighteenth century to an aristocrat and an enslaved woman, he received in Paris the education of a court gentleman: violinist, fencer, Freemason, participant in the Revolution, and conductor, he was also a composer. It is naturally to the violin that he dedicated his finest works, among which the concertos, marked by a virtuosity that is both unbridled and graceful, stand out in particular. Romuald Grimbert-Barr� and the Orchestre national de Cannes pay tribute to this extraordinary life by pairing the Op. 5 and Op. 8 concertos with Thierry P�cou's Concerto Hommage � Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George. Through it's many biographical references, the work offers multiple poetic points of entry into the life of this singular and fascinating figure, who remains far too little known today.

The new recording project by La Compagnia del Madrigale is dedicated to the Ninth Book of Madrigals (1588) by Giaches de Wert. Wert-Flemish by birth but active for most of his life in Italy at the Gonzaga court in Mantua-embodies the figure of the great composer capable of transcending fashion to create art that, as they used to say in the sixteenth century, is destined to remain durable and eternal. The Ninth Book, published during a period of personal tribulation and heartbreak over his thwarted love for the poetess Tarquinia Molza, marks a pinnacle of artifice and pathos. Here, Wert explores the heights of Petrarch's Canzoniere, alongside verses by Torquato Tasso, Jacopo Sannazaro, and Battista Guarini, alternating luminous courtly homages with an innovative lyricism that foreshadows the style of Carlo Gesualdo. La Compagnia del Madrigale - one of the world-leading ensembles in the performance of Monteverdi, Marenzio, Gesualdo, and Rore - delivers these pages with absolute artistic excellence.

Vivaldi's famous Four Seasons are dedicated to Count Wenzel von Morzin from Prague. In 1718, he traveled to Venice with his 'virtuosissimo orchestra' and hired Vivaldi as 'maestro di musica italiano'. This marked the beginning of an era of close musical exchange between Venice and Prague. This relationship, which shaped an entire generation of Czech composers, is the focus of Vivaldi in Prague. The program includes concertos by Franti�ek Jir�nek, who was employed in Count Morzin's chapel and studied in Vivaldi's circle in Venice from 1724 to 1726, and by Anton�n Reichenauer, whose musical thinking was strongly influenced by Vivaldi's school. The program is complemented by a bassoon concerto by Vivaldi dedicated to Count Morzin, an aria from a Vivaldi opera performed in Prague in 1730, and two arias from Vivaldi pasticcios reconstructed by Robert Rawson for this production. These pasticcios were compiled by the Venetian impresario Antonio Denzio from popular Vivaldi operas and presented to Prague audiences with new texts, including some in Czech.

In 1696, the Salzburg court conductor Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber described his print of seven chamber suites ("Partien") for two string instruments and basso continuo as "artful vocal harmony" in ornate Latin. These trio sonatas are of a special kind, because the two upper voices are not limited to the typical imitations practised in Italy at that time, but Biber allows the solo voices to be played in a free, expressive manner. He allows them to shine in a different light in virtuoso interplay above the bass foundation, repeatedly in full-bodied polyphony or in chords. In addition, new timbres are created through the use of the violin, viola and viola d'amore in various combinations and the 'detuning' of the strings (scordatura) to achieve different string tensions and thus give the instruments a sharper or softer sound. This recording is the third installment of the Biber recordings with Harmonie Universelle.

The Kuss Quartet and violist Muriel Razavi embark on a three-volume traversal of the six Mozart String Quintets. The first of these works dates from 1777 and was closely modeled on the contemporaneous quintets by Michael Haydn. The G minor, the 4th of the quintets was composed in 1786. It is dark, turbulent and melancholy, typical of the composer's G minor works. It is composed on a large scale, especially the opening movement, something it shares with the Prague Symphony No. 38 and the 25th Piano Concerto in C composed at the same time. The Kuss Quartet include two short works for string quartet by contemporary composers to place in between the two quintets and to round the album off.