SIBELIUS: KULLERVO

ROMANTIC VIOLIN CONCERTO 20

Essential listening... "fabulously assured"... "unequivocally excellent", are just a few of the critical superlatives earned by Martyn Brabbins's magnificent Vaughan Williams symphony cycle. In this, the penultimate release of the series, two of the late symphonies are coupled with more rare works.

Angela Hewitt's new album is clearly destined to become a favorite. It features some of the best-known musical declarations of love across the centuries, heard in transcriptions by some of the great pianists (including Angela herself).

Classical Music

Both sonatas recorded here are the work of the young Brahms, who was still a teenager when he wrote Op.2. They are paired with, and perfectly complement the much later rhapsodies. These are magisterial accounts from Garrick Ohlsson, a pianist noted for his mastery of the Romantics.

Vaughan Williams's incidental music for The Pilgrim's Progress has seldom been heard in it's original guise since the 1906 premiere. Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra couple it with outstanding interpretation of the composer's Symphony No 5.

On this exciting release from Hyperion, Stephen Hough performs a collection of exquisite Brahmsian miniatures. The pianist refers to these works as brief meditations on last things before 'the light fades and the final cigar is extinguished.'

Stanford's eight-part Latin Magnificat was posthumously dedicated to Parry, whose own Songs of farewell are unmistakably valedictory in mood. Personal as well as musical associations run deep in this poignantly expressive program from James O'Donnell and the Westminster Abbey Choir.

PIANO CONCERTO

Palestrina: Lamentations - Cinquecento - Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was perhaps the preeminent composer of the sixteenth century. His settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah would have been integral to the liturgical rites of Holy Week. On this release, Cinquecento offer performances that bring out every nuance of this emotionally powerful music.

SPEM IN ALIUM

SONGS BY DONALD SWANN

Two substantial Mass settings from Jacob Regnart, sound as though might have written them specifically for the glorious voices of Cinquecento. This is a welcome contribution to the restoration of an important, but still under-appreciated, figure.

The emotional sweep of these marvelous works, reflecting the vicissitudes of Schumann's complex personal life at the time, calls for a pianist wholly responsive to their fervent Romanticism. The artistry of Stephen Hough proves ideal.

PIANO QUINTET IN G MINOR - STRING QUARTET NO.1

WESTERN WYNDE MASS / MISSA MATER CHRISTI SANCTISSI

35 year-old Jack Liebeck has established himself as one of the most compelling young violinists on the concert platform today. On Volume 19 of Hyperion's Romantic Violin Concerto series he turns in a dazzling performance of the much recorded Bruch Violin Concerto No.1 and readings of the gorgeous Serenade Op.75 and Romance Op.42 that are full of youthful vigor.

Dona Nobis Pacem became a somewhat unexpected hit for Vaughan Williams. A fervently antiwar plea, the work remains to this day one of the composer's most widely performed works. Coupled with it here is the first recording of Stephen Hough's Missa Mirabilis (the title derives from an unfortunate motorway incident), a work which shares with the Vaughan Williams an ability to seem very much greater than the sum of it's parts. Andrew Litton directs the Colorado Symphony and all-star soloists Sarah Fox and Christopher Maltman.

Volume seven of Hyperion's Complete Strauss Songs cycle focuses on the juvenilia. But the mysterious TrV references obfuscate compositions of a beauty hard to reconcile with the facts behind their genesis (Strauss was just six when he penned the first of them - his mother had to write in the words for him). Three new singers - Ruby Hughes, Ben Johnson and G�nter Haumer - join Roger Vignoles in this most unexpected of recitals to relish.

The Orlando Consort's third recording for Hyperion turns to the music of Loyset Comp�re, a composer the group first investigated some twenty years ago. In the intervening decades musicological research has elevated this composer from also-ran outsider to something of a trailblazer. For example, the wonderfully complex Magnificat recorded here, is now thought to predate the masterworks of Josquin by some fifteen years. A gorgeous selection of motets and chansons further charts this period of radical musical experimentation.

Florian Boesch possesses a sensuously attractive baritone voice, first-rate diction and remarkable acting ability. Following on his acclaimed album of Loewe songs, Boesch is joined again by Roger Vignoles for an album of Schubert Lieder. Der Wanderer focuses on the composer's darker songs. They encapsulate a recurrent theme of German Romantic art: that of the rootless outsider. It is the world of Goethe's mysterious Harper and Mignon, and of the solitary, silhouetted figures in the darker landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In music it found it's supreme expression, not only in Schubert's Winterreise but in these many individual 'wandering' songs: some grimly resigned, some serenely contemplative, others imbued with a sense of physical and spiritual isolation and longing for an ultimately unattainable 'otherness.'

The Gramophone Award-winning ensemble Arcangelo presents a selection from Monteverdi's last three books of madrigals. These ardent and passionate works are microcosms of Monteverdi's great operas and among his most celebrated music. The eighth book of madrigals introduces the genere concitato - (agitated style) that Monteverdi devised to convey the emotions of war, whether physical or psychological. Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda sets an extended passage from Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata. Tasso's text, set in the time of the first crusade, tells of the combat between the Christian knight Tancredi and the Saracen maiden Clorinda. Most of the action is conveyed by a narrator, sung here by celebrated tenor James Gilchrist.

WELL TEMPERED CLAVIER BOOK 2

COMPLETE PIANO MUSIC 38: LES PRELUDES