The fact that Timothy Ridout has recorded a whole album of music for unaccompanied viola before the age of thirty is a telling indication of the meteoric rise of this prodigious, boundary-pushing artist. As is his choice of contrasting the Baroque era (Telemann and Bach) with two figures of modern music, in Britten's rarely heard Elegy and Caroline Shaw's in manus tuas. This program is a breathtaking ode to the viola over the centuries, played with all the fire of youth.

With selections ranging from Praetorius to Britten, plus all-time favorites such as J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio and Handel's Messiah, this album brings together some of the most beautiful and justly famous musical settings of the Nativity story. Festive or intimate, exuberant or elegiac, these highlights from iconic recordings in harmonia mundi's voluminous catalogue are an ideal sampling of the Christmas magic across epochs and styles.

After a formidable first volume, C�dric Tiberghien continues his exploration of Beethoven's corpus of variations. At the heart of this new album are the famous Thirty-two Variations in C minor and their tangy reminiscences of Bach - the Ciaccona from Partita No.2 for violin solo, presented here in Brahms's masterly transcription. He also takes the opportunity to show us what a certain school of American composers (Crumb, Cage, Feldman) has made of this tradition of variation form.

In their first release on harmonia mundi, Gustavo Gimeno and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra offer us a dazzling reading of the Turangal�la-Symphonie. Equally attentive to architecture and to detail, they glorify the rich and refined orchestration of the French composer's vast hymn to love, always on the lookout for unprecedented sonic alchemies. This album is a unique musical and sensory experience.

Passionate about travel, Saint-Sa�ns was strongly influenced by the cultural diversity he encountered in North Africa. Zahia Ziouani, as one immersed in these twin cultures herself, is able to shed new light on the composer's travel-inspired works by reflecting them through the prism of traditional Algerian music, ranging from Ahmed El Alaoui to Idir and performed in the company of Rachid Brahim-Djelloul, this is a fascinating musical dialogue.

For this new instalment of their series devoted to British music of the eighteenth century, the musicians of La Rêveuse take us to London in the 1740s. The leading Italian and German virtuosos Handel invited to play in his orchestra brought a powerful wind of change to English musical life, while the Scot James Oswald achieved the tour de force of making the music of his country fashionable in the drawing rooms of London.

Akademie Fur Alte Musik Berlin - Mozart: Gran Partita - The great art of musical entertainment When Mozart takes over the popular genre of serenade, it is to transcend it and give it it's nobility. A festive masterpiece of simplicity and emotion, his Gran Partita quickly became a hit! Thanks to the sliced and captivating colours of their period instruments, the members of the Akademie f-r Alte Musik Berlin give full flavour to these two extraordinary serenades, where a tremendous wind of freedom blows. 2021 release.

Following on their impressive debut album [Ex]tradition, the Curious Bards - an early music ensemble founded by violinist Alix Boivert in 2015 - continue to explore material from the Scottish and Irish folk traditions preserved in 18th-century publications. This new collection of airs and dances is a chance to discover more of this fascinating repertoire, in which the distinctions between serious music and popular inspiration need no longer apply.

Ever since it's release in 2011, this album has been one of the jewels of Isabelle Faust's discography, with Daniel Harding and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra providing tremendous accompaniment in the concerto. The coupling is a poignant reading of the delicate and highly personal Sextet no.2. "Her performance is wonderfully proportioned... never grandiose nor unnecessarily rhetorical, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra supplying perfectly scaled support..."(The Guardian).

His debut recording devoted to Schumann offered a brilliant opportunity to discover the name of Samuel Hasselhorn, a young baritone deeply invested in the art of lieder. With his collaborator Joseph Middleton, he now turns to Schubert, in an insightful program evoking some of the themes dear to the Viennese master of song: nature, night-time, parting, absence, and death. Both essential and less familiar songs are featured side by side in this poignant depiction of profound self-reflection that can rank among the most moving examples of what the Romantic temperament has ever produced.

After Beethoven, Alexander Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras now turn to two more giants of the repertory. Chopin's Cello Sonata, his last work published in his lifetime, seems almost like a testament, sombre and tormented - a world away from the radiance and surging lyricism of the youthful work by Rachmaninoff that it inspired. These two masterpieces by composers from the two chronological extremities of Romanticism, both pianists above all, are ideally placed in perspective here.

Isabelle Faust and Fran�ois-Xavier Roth explore extremely contrasting facets of Stravinsky's output for violin. From the Concerto to the Pastorale, the composer plays with codes and colors, sketching extraordinarily vivid soundscapes. Once again, the musicians of Les Si�cles have succeeded in rediscovering the works' original dynamic by using period instruments - and that changes everything.

in 1961, the discovery of a manuscript caused a sensation in the music world. The archives of Radenín Castle, preserved in the National Museum in Prague, contained the part copy of Joseph Haydn's Cello Concerto in C major. Until then, the existence of the piece was known only through the entry in Haydn's own catalog of works; the sheet music, however, had been lost. The first performance in Prague and a first recording as well as a printed edition of the sheet music made the public acquainted with the piece in 1962 - the success was resounding.

Although the concerto was composed between 1761 and 1765, Haydn's first years as Kapellmeister to Prince Eszterházy, the piece presents itself as a fully realized masterpiece. There is no fumbling and experimenting, Haydn masters all formal and structural problems with which a composer in the epoch of the early classical awakening was confronted. With rapid virtuoso passages, it also places high demands on the soloist, and the melody is often enough in the technically demanding high register. Thus, the composition also testifies to the outstanding level of the princely court orchestra. Haydn had already entrusted the cellist Joseph Weigl, who was a member of his orchestra between 1761 and 1769, with several solo parts in his early symphonies. With his C major concerto, he made this extraordinarily talented virtuoso immortal.

The Second Cello Concerto, composed in 1783, also had a checkered history. The composition was dedicated to Anton Kraft, who, according to contemporary testimony, was the "first master of his instrument. Kraft's fame as a cellist seemed to outshine Haydn's esteem as a composer in the 19th century; otherwise it can hardly be explained that he was also considered the composer of the piece for a long time. Furthermore, the work was performed for a long time in an arrangement from 1890, which, although it did not challenge Haydn's authorship, virtually distorted the piece by profound interventions in the musical text. Thus a persistent prejudice of lack of tension and ponderousness against the D major concerto could arise. Only the recovery of the autograph in 1954 restored the work to its original beauty, its cheerfully entertaining tone and its sheer inexhaustible richness of melody.

The Kafka-Fragmente, settings of excerpts from the diary, letters and a posthumous text by the author of The Trial, take the form of an intimate confession with no real narrative thread. Kurt�g chose a soprano voice and a solo violin to express this fascinating kaleidoscope of emotional landscapes, in which humor, sensuality, desire and tenderness emerge in turn. This recording is a rare opportunity to hear the duo of Isabelle Faust and Anna Prohaska, both at the peak of their artistry.

If the Piano Concertos Nos.19 and 23 are among the most famous in the corpus, it is of course because of their sublime middle movements, but also because they reach the very heights of Mozartian subtlety in terms of orchestration, thematic development and dramatic instinct. The historically informed performances from Kristian Bezuidenhout and Freiburger Barockorchester take the same interpretative approach as earlier volumes in the series, underpinned by an utterly luminous musical discourse.