The Vasari Singers’ annual carol concerts always provide a warming blend of traditional favourites and less well-known music from all periods and styles. Here, joyous and masterful 16th-century polyphony sits alongside eternally popular Victorian carols, and exquisitely crafted settings by Howells and Walford Davies join works as recent as Gabriel Jackson’s The Christ-child. Bob Chilcott magically superimposes traditional carols with entrancing new material, and no Vasari Christmas would be complete without some close harmony Swingle singing.

Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Consort and Choir honour the 400th anniversary of 16th-century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo with a reissue of their seminal recording of Tenebrae Responses for Good Friday. Honouring the 400th anniversary of Carlo Gesualdo, the harmonically adventurous and experimental 16th-century Italian composer, Prince of Venosa, Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Consort and Choir offer a newly repackaged reissue of their seminal recording of Tenebae, the composer's final group of sacred madrigals devoted to Good Friday. The Taverner singers navigate Gesualdo's highly symbolic polyphonic structures with idiomatic first-rate performances and incisive scholarship.

Choral elements from Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and medieval traditions are included in this anthology of anthems and motets, many drawing inspiration from the Psalms. They range from sixteenth-century Germany (Eccard), through the nineteenth-century Anglican tradition of Hanforth, Stainer and Stanford and the twentieth-century Catholicism of Poulenc, to contemporary England (Rose, Tavener, Harvey), Scotland (MacMillan), Australia (Halley) and the USA (Paulus). Previous recordings from the Choir of St John's, Elora have been described as "a real joy" (Gramophone on 8. 557037, Faire is the Heaven), and "world-class... sensational" Psalms for the Soul).

Classical Music

Wunderlich, FRITZ: Historical Recording (1954-1965)

Drama, surprise, humour and still life - with a bubbling undertone of anarchy. Composer Ib Nørholm (b. 1931) presents us with a delightful twist on Danish nocturne and condensed music drama for two in Tavole per Orfeo. This world premiere recording by soprano Else Torp and guitarist Per Pålsson unfolds as a fascinating testimony to an inspired encounter between words and music and a meeting of strong artistic personalities. Else is a core member of Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, with whom she has performed around the world.

Classical Music

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lied increasingly took on orchestral garb. The boundary with opera became almost impalpable. That is what Samuel Hasselhorn and Lukasz Borowicz demonstrate here, in a splendid program mingling smiles and disillusionment, where some of the most characteristic orchestral lieder and operatic arias of this Austro-German 'fin de siecle' era blend perfectly together.

For their very first recording with harmonia mundi, the duo formed by Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy offers us three closely related works: Schubert's celebrated Fantasy, his Divertissement à la hongroise, full of contrasts between bursts of energy and enigmatic mists, and Leonid Desyatnikov's Trompe-l'œil, written specifically 'to echo' the Fantasy. This porgram is an intriguing hall of mirrors.

An outlier in the French harpsichord world, Gaspard Le Roux composed music of unique inventiveness and richness at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Juxtaposing his pieces with others by Lully, Marais and Francois Couperin, William Christie and Justin Taylor have found the ideal alchemy to do full justice to the myriad colors of these Suites, as virtuosic as they are rich in new emotions.

The infallible Gesualdo Six trademarks of consummate musicianship and scholarly integrity are much in evidence here. Queen of Hearts addresses and reflects on queens spiritual (the Virgin Mary) and temporal (Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn, among others) in a program of music largely of the sixteenth century, but spiced with two short works from the twenty-first.

Encountering a palace of riches is how pianist (and Hyperion debutante) Mishka Rushdie Momen describes her experience of playing Tudor keyboard music, a varied selection of which is included here. It's a description which could apply equally to the listener discovering the music in performances as convincingly idiomatic as these.

Although John Ireland is best remembered for his orchestral works, his 91 songs convey a peculiarly English quality of emotion expressed through reserve.

Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia - patron of the arts, collector, woman of letters and composer - was an extraordinary personality. The flautist Jean Bregnac pays her vibrant homage with a program featuring works by her proteges Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, her mentor Johann Philipp Kirnberger, and the princess herself.

"His command is absolute, the mood calmingly resigned... The underlying melancholy (missed here by many) is fully brought out... [others] Weber's concertino, excellently exploits the clarinet's qualities... Baermann's Adagio has a certain melodic grace of an operatic kind ; and Debussy's Rhapsodie (competition work) has a lot of characteristic things, and never suggests that it was a piece he really had to write... Brymer's playing will be familiar from many recordings: He has a smooth technique, a lovely liquid tone - rich and warm in the clarion register, oily and vibrant in the chalumeau... He phrases Kramář with grace in the outer movements and expression in the Adagio; a skillful, thoroughly musical performance". (Gramophone)

This first release in an exclusive recital collaboration with harmonia mundi presents Julian Prégardien's reading of a cycle that explores quintessentially Schubertian themes: nature, love, solitude, death. Taking full advantage of the unique timbres of a Graf-style fortepiano, the young German tenor and Kristian Bezuidenhout create an expressive palette of exceptional variety, full of striking contrasts.

Get ready to enjoy music from the Indiana Jones films, The Mummy, Angels and Demons, The Adventures of Tintin and Lawrence of Arabia with music by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer and many more.

The Nocturnes and Barcarolles are key works in Fauré's output for solo piano that reflect his stylistic evolution. From his early efforts, still close to Chopin and Schumann, to the final pieces with their heady yet elusive harmonies, Aline Piboule invites us to rediscover a whole world of sound on a sublime Gaveau instrument of 1929.

Moving from the style galant to the Age of Revolutions, this album is an invitation to discover half a century of the cello concerto's history. A few years after a sensational first volume devoted to C.P.E. Bach, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Riccardo Minasi and Ensemble Resonanz pay tribute to the hypersensitivity of the cello and honor with panache the transcendental virtuosity of the unjustly overlooked Antonín Kraft.

On this new album, Florence Bolton and Benjamin Perrot revisit the composer who gave their ensemble it's delightful name, La Rêveuse. Drawing on his heritage (Sainte-Colombe), his friendships (Robert de Visée) and his own visionary genius, Marin Marais blazed new trails for his instrument in his second book of viol pieces (1701). Alongside the customary dances and sets of variations, he invented the 'character pieces' that were to become so popular in the eighteenth century.

GOLDBERG VARIATIONS / VARIATIONS

This is the complete video release of Brahms' chamber music with several reference recordings. Moreover, the 16 hours of SD-quality video materials presented here on a single Blu-ray disc are equivalent to about eight standard DVD releases. This edition features great performances by today's most outstanding artists showcasing their thrilling artistry in inimitable performances. A must for any Brahms aficionado!

The challenges and rewards of performing early music are here vividly illustrated by The Binchois Consort, as creative scholarship comes to the aid of two substantial-but fragmentary-works by Jacob Obrecht, and an audacious recorded sound attempts to recreate the experience of the original performers 500 years ago. A novel twenty-first-century motet is also included, emerging from the prevailing Renaissance textures to reflect on themes of mourning and loss.

For Mahan Esfahani, Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias were more than just the tools by which his children and pupils were to acquire a prodigious technique. These 'tiny gems' (as Esfahani call them) reveal expressive depths to rival the major keyboard works and make considerable demands of the performer's musical mettle. The is the sixth instalment in his unmissable complete Bach keyboard survey.

For their first collaboration on harmonia mundi, Pablo Heras-Casado and Anima Eterna explore the world of Bruckner. The first instalment in this series is his tremendous Symphony No.4. An apotheosis of architectural rigour and poetry, this cathedral in sound, thanks to the unique sonorities of the period instruments played by the Bruges orchestra, regains it's lightness and elegance in dazzling orchestral colors!