Inspired by a time of war, protest, and a nation on the brink, Shostakovich's Symphony No.11 reflects upon the tumult and tragedy of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Shostakovich was believed to have said the Eleventh Symphony was 'about the people', and the beginning of the work captures the sombre repression felt by many at the time. The work is sometimes dubbed as a 'film score without the film', and this is truly evident as the music unfolds. It begins to embody a spirit of courage-of struggle for a just cause. Eventually, the symphony takes on an overwhelming intensity as it depicts the workers' uprising that ensued-one that the composer's own father and uncle were a part of and, miraculously, survived. Conductor Gianandrea Noseda is known for his mastery of Russian repertoire, and his Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov recordings on the LSO's own label have attracted glowing reviews. This album is the next in a revered cycle of Shostakovich's complete symphonies with Gianandrea Noseda, which already comprises nine of the fifteen symphonies.

Antonio Pappano and the Staatskapelle Dresden perform Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2 in the spectacular Semperoper, a work that is particularly associated with the city of Dresden. Pappano also gives a comprehensive introduction to the work and plays the key passages of the symphony.

For Volker Bertelmann, aka Hauschka, music is not solely about it's sound, but also a means to facilitate the exchange of ideas and foster meaningful interactions between individuals, revealing his fascination with human connection and engagement. Despite being known for his distinctive prepared piano sound, the Academy Award-winning composer intentionally named his 15th solo studio album PHILANTHROPY to express his compassion and openness. The album's song titles, such as "Diversity," "Nature," "Loved Ones," and "Altruism," perfectly align with their respective musical compositions. Hauschka's albums often serve as a platform to provoke dialogue on specific themes, and PHILANTHROPY follows this pattern, aiming to offer optimism and energy in response to the challenges of recent years. The album combines upbeat and pensive pieces, featuring moments of joy, introspection, and peaceful interludes. Overall, PHILANTHROPY showcases Hauschka's compositional prowess and serves as a gift that sparks reflection and celebration. A1. Diversity A2. Searching A3. Inventions A4. Detached A5. Limitation of Lifetime A6. Nature B1. Science B2. Loved Ones B3. Generosity B4. Magnanimity B5. Altruism B6. Noise

James Ehnes picks up the viola for his first recording of the two Brahms sonatas Op.120 of 1894, in the composer's arrangement for viola and piano. Originally written for clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld, Brahms made subtle changes for the viola versions, and in so doing he greatly enriched the meagre viola sonata repertoire with these two late masterpieces. Schumann composed his Marchenbilder (Fairy Tale Pictures) in a few days in March 1851. They are imbued with a potent sense of fantasy - imagination runs riot, from melancholy to drama. James Ehnes plays on the 1696 'Achinto' Stradivari viola for this recording, courtesy of the Royal Academy of Music.

For her debut concerto album, violinist Veronika Eberle revisits a work that has endured more than two centuries, and shares a fresh interpretation featuring new cadenzas by composer Jorg Widmann. "May listeners hear the Violin Concerto-in all it's stark radicalism, it's brazen beauty and it's love of experimentation-in a new way with these cadenzas: as contemporary music of today." (Jorg Widmann) Not only is Beethoven's Violin Concerto a particular favorite of Veronika, it has been central to her career to date-most notably alongside Sir Simon Rattle, who has been Veronika's long-time supporter and collaborator. When she was just 16, Sir Simon introduced her at the 2006 Salzburg Easter Festival, where she performed this very concerto to a packed Salzburg Festpielhaus. On this album, the pair reunite to bring this sublime masterpiece to life, and to celebrate the work that first brought Veronika to international attention.

LSO Live presents the fourth album in the Panufnik Legacies series. Composer Jack Sheen steps onto the podium to lead the London Symphony Orchestra in new music by some of the most exciting early-career composers of today. The works on this recording are all written by alumni of the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers' Scheme, which offers six composers each year the opportunity to write for a world-class symphony orchestra, guided by renowned composer Colin Matthews with support from composer Christian Mason. The Panufnik Legacies IV contains world premiere recordings of compositions by Jack Sheen, Dan Stern, Ryan Latimer, Benjamin Graves, Daniel Fardon, Amy Bryce, Daniel Kidane, James Albany Hoyle, Grace-Evangeline Mason, Cassie Kinoshi, Joel Jarventausta, George Stevenson, James Chan and Joe Bates.

Italy, Florence - nothing gives me the slightest pleasure so far wrote Tchaikovsky to his brother. "I cannot live outside Russia." In the depth of depression, the composer commenced work on his sextet, Souvenir de Florence, which he completed upon his return to Russia in June 1890. Melancholy Russian folk melodies mingle with Tchaikovsky's Florentine theme rising in the Adagio. In 1892, with more creative struggles - a symphony in E flat was abandoned (much of it becoming the 3rd piano concerto and the Andante & Finale), and a new symphony in B minor was started. If the melancholy of Souvenir de Florence is never far from the surface, it threatens to overwhelm the 6th symphony. "I am very proud of the symphony, and I think it's the best of my compositions." Tchaikovsky died 9 days after conducting it's first performance, a victim of the cholera pandemic raging over the Russian Empire.

In his new album, Jordi Savall, undisputed master of early music, reveals a new interpretation of Haydn's Seasons. With an approach that respects tradition while injecting his own unique signature, Savall breathes new life into this masterpiece. His use of period instruments and his acute sense of detail offer a freshness and emotional depth never heard before. At once timeless and innovative, this album immerses the listener in the very essence of nature and the seasons, capturing the beauty and richness of Haydn's work with a rare intensity. An experience not to be missed.

Performing three concertos written specifically for him, renowned violinist Gil Shaham is joined by acclaimed conductor Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now (TON), Bard College's graduate orchestral masters. Scott Wheeler's "Birds of America" (Violin Concerto No.2) was premiered by Shaham, Botstein, and TON at the Fisher Center at Bard and Carnegie Hall in 2021. The birds making appearances in the concerto include a hawk, a whippoorwill, loons, a mourning dove, and a downy woodpecker. Winner of the 2018 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, Avner Dorman's "Nigunim" (Violin Concerto No.2) was originally commissioned as Sonata No.3 for violin and piano by New York's 92nd Street Y, Gil, and his sister, pianist Orli Shaham. Gil premiered the orchestrated version that appears on this album with CityMusic Cleveland, conducted by Dorman, in 2014. The main melodic gestures of the piece are drawn from common elements found in Jewish music from around the world. Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng's violin concerto "Let Fly" had it's premiere in 2013 with Shaham and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, led by legendary conductor Leonard Slatkin. The title of the work was inspired by an aural image of the violin melody flying off into the air.

Mendelssohn's incidental music left it's mark on his contemporaries with it's virtuosity, it's subtle orchestration and it's evocative power. Here, Pablo Heras-Casado, the Freiburger Barockorchester and the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin present the music absolutely complete, flanked by Max Urlacher as a wonderfully ebullient narrator. Their historically informed interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream offers a delightful plunge into this world of dreams and enchantment.

Edward Gardner, now in his fifth season as Principal Conductor, continues to shape the LPO's distinctive sound with authority and brilliance. Gardner's long-standing relationship with Tippett's music is captured once again in this powerful live performance of A Child of Our Time. Recorded live in concert at London's Royal Festival Hall, this powerful performance - with the voices of the London Adventist Chorale especially deepening the soul-stirring impact of the Spirituals - highlights Gardner's long-standing affinity with Tippett's music, bringing conviction and emotional depth to this searing work of oppression, compassion and hope.

On her fifth album, Ellen Arkbro brings her instincts for structurally elegant songwriting to extended improvisations. Her durational works move like water: They can be choppy on the surface, disturbed by harsh gusts of wind, or suspensefully still, belying the roiling forces deep below. Her towering organ chords billow and undulate, seeking internally discordant phrases and resolving them incrementally, slipping against one another with a luxuriant friction. While Arkbro's For Organ and Brass (2017) took a formalist approach, testing the mechanical limits of it's instruments, and Sounds While Waiting (2023) took a contextual one, offering up an explicit (if tongue-in-cheek) social-spatial function, Nightclouds is unabashedly Romantic and representational. Arkbro, steering directly into the storm, conjures the mortal awe of the sublime. LP

Newly arrived in Paris, where he meets again his ex-pupil Marie-Antoinette, Gluck decides to court the Parisian public by revising one of his great Viennese successes: Orfeo ed Euridice. More than a simple adaptation to the French language and taste, his Orphee et Eurydice proves to be an out-and-out aesthetic revolution. This operatic wind of change has been recaptured for us to rediscover by Paul Agnew, Les Arts Florissants and three exceptional soloists.

Cuban-born American composer Tania Leon was Composer-in-Residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 2023-2025. During this period, she not only brought a bold new voice to the concert stage with a number of world premieres, but also mentored the LPO's Young Composers, championing living composers and diversity in contemporary music. Premiered in the UK by the LPO under Karina Canellakis at the Royal Festival Hall in October 2023, Horizons (1999) is an evocative orchestral work reflects Leon's fluid musical form - an ever-shifting stream punctuated by vivid foreground events and rich textures. Commissioned by the LPO and Concertgebouw Brugge and [world] premiered by the LPO under Edward Gardner in March 2024, Raices explores Leon's multicultural heritage through a vibrant, three-part structure that fuses contemplative textures, lively Latin rhythms and jazz-inflected exuberance. A Pulitzer Prize-winning work premiered by the New York Philharmonic and given it's UK premiere by the LPO in 2023 under the baton of Dima Slobodeniouk, Stride draws inspiration from women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony's determined spirit. It's powerful rhythmic language blends Black music traditions from the US and Caribbean with the modality of the orchestra. With it's European premiere by the LPO under Edward Gardner in February 2025, the vivid four-part Pasajes evokes the sounds, sights, and joyful spirit of Leon's childhood in Cuba. Rich in color, rhythm and narrative, it is a sonic gallery of cultural memory, celebration and radio playing in the street.

In it's fascination with Italy, nurtured by all that was best in Florence, Rome and Venice, 17th-century France saw the blossoming of a new national art. Though Lully in his pomp might seem to have subdued the musical world of his time, the ensemble La Palatine has helped us to restore it in a quite different constellation - one that is far more diverse, overflowing with imaginative riches.

Two organists and a sound poet walk into a studio. What results is not a punchline, although it is often funny: How do I know if my cat likes me?, the first record from Swedish musicians Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall and Norwegian artist Hanne Lippard, is a collection of existential meditations on the uselessness of language. "Modern Spanking," adapted from an existing text of Lippard's, free-associates it's way from the phrase "online banking" toward "breathing down your neck banking / stabbing an open wound banking" and "sexy but bankrupt"-you guessed it-"banking." "The long goodbye" imagines an excruciating dialogue between acquaintances who can't politely disengage: "It's always enriching to explore new ideas with you!" deadpans Lippard, who replies to herself, "Definitely! I hope to see you soon! / I hope so too! / I'm really looking forward to the next time! / I couldn't agree more!" Punctuated by Arkbro and Lindwall's majestic organ chords, which thwart their own grandiosity with impeccable comic timing, How do I know if my cat likes me? extends the lineage of Roberts Ashley and Barry's droll concept poetry, hammering at the sounds of language until they dislodge all signifiers through pleasurably numbing repetition. It's like doing a Captcha over and over until all the characters fuzz to hieroglyphs, or finding oneself mired in an endless, tautological customer-service argument, but after you dead-end at nonsense, you stumble into an unexpectedly transcendent beauty, where language flips from pure function to pure aesthetic, shimmering with possibility.

Layers of Afternoon is meant to reflect a certain experience of time-something both tangible and vague, felt yet not easily described. These moments often emerge in patterns, sometimes brief, sometimes sustained, but always formative. We recognize their uniqueness, yet something subconscious in us yearns to identify and indulge in these patterns. Perhaps we avoid discussing them for fear of sounding mundane or inconsequential, yet they return to our memories often, offering collective comfort. For Keith Kenniff aka Goldmund, language does little to convey these experiences; only art and music seem to come close to capturing what makes them special. Kenniff explains, "My aim for the music in Layers of Afternoon was to find this in-between place and write from there, hoping to communicate my experience of the world as ideal-free from goals, musical training, or emotional complexity. I wanted to visit this space and let the moments float freely within the act of creation." Working with violinist Scott Moore, Kenniff crafts a sonic landscape that lingers between nostalgia and fleeting presence, allowing listeners to drift through the blurred edges of memory.

November 24th, 2024, marked the 50th Annyversary of Nick Drake's untimely passing at the age of just 26, so it seemed like the right time to honor another of his studio albums "FIVE LEAVES LEFT". This time I wanted to go back to where it all began and take Drake's is first album and put it on my Piano canvas. Everything about "FIVE LEAVES LEFT" has fresh, more positive vibe, in contrast to the harshness of his latest "Pink Moon" and thoughts of his impeding death.

Maria Callas remains one of the most iconic and transformative figures in operatic history. With her unparalleled dramatic intensity, exquisite phrasing, and extraordinary vocal range, she redefined the art of singing in the 20th century. Every note she sang carried profound emotion, blending technical mastery with a deep understanding of character and story. This collection captures Callas at her finest, breathing life into some of opera's most beloved arias. From the heart-wrenching despair of Tosca to the delicate vulnerability of La Traviata, each performance reveals her rare ability to inhabit every role completely. Her voice - at once powerful, nuanced, and unmistakably unique - continues to inspire generations of listeners and performers alike. Listening to Maria Callas is not merely hearing great singing; it is experiencing a profound act of storytelling. Her artistry transcends time, reminding us why she is, and always will be, "La Divina."

Sviatoslav Richter was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, known for his profound musical intellect, colossal technique, and uncompromising artistic integrity. His interpretations, spanning composers from Bach to 20th-century contemporaries, remain benchmarks for pianists and listeners alike. This new collection from Alto brings together Richter's performances of Brahms from the Melodiya and RCA labels.

Maria Callas remains one of the most iconic and transformative figures in operatic history. With her unparalleled dramatic intensity, exquisite phrasing, and extraordinary vocal range, she redefined the art of singing in the 20th century. Every note she sang carried profound emotion, blending technical mastery with a deep understanding of character and story. This collection captures Callas at her finest, breathing life into some of opera's most beloved arias. From the heart-wrenching despair of Tosca to the delicate vulnerability of La Traviata, each performance reveals her rare ability to inhabit every role completely. Her voice - at once powerful, nuanced, and unmistakably unique - continues to inspire generations of listeners and performers alike. Listening to Maria Callas is not merely hearing great singing; it is experiencing a profound act of storytelling. Her artistry transcends time, reminding us why she is, and always will be, "La Divina."

30 years ago, a young German countertenor recorded his first disc for harmonia mundi. Since then, Andreas Scholl has been unfailingly successful. To celebrate this outstanding artist, a box set combining six of his iconic recitals retraces the main points of his career to date. From Dowland to Handel, here is the glorious testimony of a singer at the summit of his art.

Giuseppe Tartini's "Devil's Trill Sonata" is one of the most famous and dramatic violin sonatas of the Baroque era, known as much for the legend behind it as for it's technical brilliance. In this new collection from Alto, this famous work is paired with Tartini's "Didone abbandonata" sonata and Vivaldi's Five Double Violin Concertos. All performed by the legendary violinist David Oistrakh.

Following on from their recording of the sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord, Isabelle Faust and Kristian Bezuidenhout are now joined by Kristin von der Goltz for an exploration of the wonderful pieces Bach composed for violin and basso continuo. They reveal the full the elegance and poetry of these rarely recorded works.

This fourth and last volume devoted to Mozart's Violin and Piano Sonatas is a virtual journey of initiation, from his light-filled Palatine Sonatas to the later, more intense and complex Viennese masterworks, with Mozart completely revitalizing the genre and opening up new aesthetic horizons.