In this third volume of the series, A Life in Music, Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants take us to Cothen (1717-1723) where Bach enjoyed one of the happiest times of his life. With a group of distinguished soloists, they help us rediscover some of the outstanding works of these inspiring years, including the famous Cantata the composer dedicated to his patron and friend, Prince Leopold.

The music for Assassin's Creed is here re-invented for piano, with the inspired playing of Nicolas Horvath. Recorded on a historic piano that formerly belonged to Nadia Boulanger, this album presents the iconic themes of the saga in a new artistic dimension, while totally respecting the milieu of the game. A landmark event, uniting musical demands with the culture of the video game.

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, Faure's Elegie, and Weill's Youkali.

From the lyricism of Bloch's Schelomo to the modernity of Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Gustavo Gimeno explore the cello's lyrical side, revealing itself as prayer, lament, or murmur. In contrast, the Polish composer's Concerto for Orchestra celebrates vitality and collective energy. This program is a journey from inner song to orchestral power.

A precursor in this field as in so many others, Telemann gave the viola it's very first masterpieces, immediately establishing it as a solo instrument in it's own right. Alongside Sabine Fehlandt and the musicians of the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin, Antoine Tamestit pays splendid tribute to this pioneering music, which blends melodic charm and contrapuntal rigor into an organic whole.

Haydn's relationship with the keyboard was so intimate and inspirational that it enabled him to develop ideas of the most varied character. From the whimsical to the dramatic, this highly attractive music combines mischievousness, ingenuousness, eloquence and lyricism. Haydn's wealth of contrasts is interpreted with unique grace by Paul Lewis.

Volume 4 of Benjamin Alard's complete recording of Bach's keyboard works continues to explore the Weimar period. After A la francaise, we turn to Italy, where the Vivaldian concerto reigned in Venice. The young Bach created here a wonderful space of freedom between the transcriber and the improviser. Benjamin Alard performs on three exceptional instruments, including a magnificent 1702 harpsichord by Mattia de Gand, preserved in Treviso and recently restored.

2020 holiday release. It's Christmas. Graham Ross invites you to explore the highly individual conception of traditional carols offered by Twentieth Century British composers and, notably, the most eminent among them, Benjamin Britten. Arranged around his famous Ceremony of Carols is a selection of wonderful choral pieces with or without organ, each of which testifies in it's own way to the meticulous care Britten brought to these musical gems, most of them deriving from English folk tradition.

This is William Christie's valedictory disc for Harmonia Mundi before seeking pastures new with Erato. All five works belong to Handel's last and greatest set of concertos, Op. 6, printed in London in 1740. They are splendid pieces and I never tire of listening to them. Christie has chosen three of the four concertos for which optional oboe parts have survived (Nos. I. 2 and 6), as well as the seventh and tenth concertos of the set. It is as good a choice as any if choices have to be made and Christie brings the music to life with all his characteristic enthusiasm and feeling for Handelian idiom. The orchestra of Les Arts Florissants sound on good form, too, achieving a pleasant warmth of string timbre and a greater unanimity of sound than has sometimes been the case in earlier issues.

On the whole I like the presence of oboes in the aforementioned concertos, though the music loses nothing by their absence. Perhaps they are a shade too prominent in the G major Concerto (Op. 6 No. I) but I doubt if this seemingly slight imbalance will bother readers. What I did find more disconcerting, though, were some of the embellishments and cadential elaborations which felt too extended or spun out. One such instance occurs at the close of the Larghetto andante e piano of the F major Concerto (Op. 6 No. 2), where the continuo archlute launches into a veritable solo, albeit in miniature; and again, at the conclusion of the following Allegro the oboes, aided and abetted by the archlute, indulge in imitative flights of fancy. Such moments are neither unimaginative nor lacking in taste but my ears tell me that they are really not necessary. Perhaps I'm just being too English about it—beware of Channel tunnels!

Apart from this reservation, I found Christie's approach refreshing and full of vitality. The playing is wonderfully articulated and the rhythms clear-cut without being at all stiff or unyielding. There are moments, too, of great delicacy as, for example, in the languorous Musette of the G minor Concerto (Op. 6 No. 6), which is eloquently shaped and plentifully endowed with affecting contrasts. Then, at the opposite end of the scale, so to speak, are infectious movements like the Hornpipe of the B flat Concerto (Op. 6 No. 7), and the robust French overture which begins the D minor Concerto (Op. 6 No. 10). Christie enlivens these admirably—though the Hornpipe is, perhaps, a little restrained---responding with spontaneity to Handel's engagingly wide terms of stylistic reference. In short, a stimulating and enjoyable performance, notwithstanding reservations which may worry some ears much less than others.

-- Gramophone [5/1995]
reviewing the original release of this title

With the intention to record music that has spoken to her, and driven her throughout her career, Orli Shaham chose to record Mozart's Piano Concertos Nos.17 and 24 with the her husband David Robertson leading the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra - two collaborators she knows and loves. Both works are emblematic of the extraordinary theatricality of Mozart's mature concertos. They are the only two that conclude with a movement cast in variation form. It is a virtuosic display of his mastery of melodic invention, highlighting the spirit of dialogue between soloist and orchestra. Orli Shaham revels in their richness and breathtaking originality.

A hybrid work between oratorio, ode and serenata, L'Allegro is undoubtedly one of Handel's most mysterious works, but also his most inspired. With their accustomed poetry, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants offer us the chance to rediscover this masterpiece, in which the composer transforms metaphysics into painting and ideas into pure emotions.

The triumph of the harp! When Marie-Antoinette arrived at the French court in 1770, she brought a harp in her luggage. Thanks to her enthusiasm, the instrument was to enjoy a revival of interest that produced an abundant repertory. Available once more from the hamronia mundi archived, "Christie's collaboration with the superb Xavier de Maistre is an exquisitely refined account of Krumpholtz's enchanting Fifth Harp Concerto" (BBC Music Magazine). "This is rococo entertainment music at it's most decorously pastel... de Maistre's playing is a marvel of delicate coloring and shimmering, perfectly even passagework." (Gramophone)

If the shadow of Mozart still haunts Schubert's Symphony No.5, the Seventh (in no way 'unfinished' in the eyes of it's creator) already looks far into the future. Pablo Heras-Casado and the musicians of the Freiburger Barockorchester lead us towards that Romantic elan. Their flexible approach, keen and swift in the earlier symphony, making room for shadows and mystery in it's successor, meets the challenge of bringing out the contrast between these 'two Schuberts', here more audible than ever.

In his Piano Quartet and Quintet, Schumann revisited the frameworks inherited from Schubert and Beethoven to create astonishingly innovative structures. Their grandiose musical and emotional gestures place these works among his supreme achievements. The prestigious artists assembled here, with their extensive experience of performing Schumann's chamber music and concertos, do full justice to his imaginative world.

While paying glittering homage to the animal kingdom, this program also takes us on a journey through the centuries. The existing pieces, freely inspired by birdsong, from Couperin to Ravel, are mirrored by an astonishing Carnival of Animals in Peril. It's composer, Vincent Bouchot, reminds us of the disappearance of certain species of animals - but also of certain unjustly neglected musical instruments.

In the late 1980s, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants recorded galvanizing versions of two masterpieces of early English opera: Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen. These two seminal interpretations are now available again, coupled for the first time in a single boxed set.

Paul Lewis explores the world of late Brahms, wherein the old master, far from growing more sedate, deploys a palette of infinite colors and sensibilities in his last four collections for solo piano. By turns tender and dazzling, intimate and tempestuous, these pieces appear to us as their composer's final confidences, entrusted to a crepuscular diary.

Notated on four staves, as though intended for some unspecified set of instruments (or even voices), these thirteen erudite contrapuncti, four canons, and an unfinished triple fugue-incorporating the letters of Bach's name-are often considered to be his musical testament. Shrouded in myths traceable to it's very origins, The Art of Fugue is a puzzle for the performers and for the listeners alike, but when a brilliant string quartet takes up the challenge, a solution becomes obvious, and the music takes flight.

A composition as brilliant as it is protean, the Mass in B minor occupied Bach until the end of his life. The earliest sections date back to 1724, others were written in 1733 in the hope of obtaining a post in Dresden. The work, which is more ecumenical than strictly Catholic, offers a digest of his art at it's expressive peak as a world in itself. Rene Jacobs, Akademie fur Alte Musik and RIAS Kammerchor were eager to revisit it, following their acclaimed interpretations of the two Passions and the Christmas Oratorio.

Unanimously hailed by the critics ever since their release in 2000, these recordings offer a chance to follow Schubert's development in the field of the piano trio, from the youthful Sonatensatz (1812) to the immense masterpieces of his maturity. The Sunday Times wrote, "The Wanderers take us on an exhilarating emotional rollercoaster ride, with a wonderful sense of conversational repartee in the fast outer movements and rapt expressions of wonderment in Schubert's sublime, songful slow movements."

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colorful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage.

Francisco Goya's paintings have left a powerful imprint on the European imagination. It was undoubtedly Granados who best translated into music, with nobility and humor, this colorful universe where majos and majas dance to love and death in the twilight glow of a dying Ancien Regime.