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.

The performance Florence Price's Piano Quintet receives on this eagerly awaited new release from the Tak�cs Quartet and Marc-Andr� Hamelin would suggest that it can be only a matter of time before the work-rediscovered only in 2009-is as familiar and much-loved as the one by Dvor�k with which it shares the album.

WEIR: IN THE LAND OF UZ; BEACH: CANTICLE OF THE

Charles Cole/London Oratory Schola Cantorum -"Sacred Treasures of Rome". Introducing the fourth album in the London Oratory Schola Cantorum's 'Sacred treasures' series on Hyperion. Sacred Treasures of Rome (Palestrina & His Contemporaries - A Golden Age of Polyphony in Rome) also features music by other Renaissance composers in Rome: Allegri, the Anerios, Animuccia, Giovannelli, Marenzio, Nanino & Soriano. Uniquely, the average age of this choir is just 14, giving boys aged 7 to 18 the opportunity of an outstanding choral education within the state-education system.

Steven Osborne -"Schubert: Piano Sonata & Moments musicaux". After dazzling performances of "Rhapsody in blue" and "Turangalila" at the 2024 BBC Proms, Steven Osborne offers reflective, mature Schubert - including the beloved "Moments musicaux." The Piano Sonata in A major, D959, is the mightiest of the piano works from the final year of Schubert's short yet prodigious life.

From TV theme tunes to a folk-inspired 'circle dance on seven notes' by Villa-Lobos, Laurence Perkins-aided by a wide variety of accompanists-presents another pleasing miscellany of composers and works (no fewer than fourteen of each) demonstrating the many moods and expressive potential of the bassoon.

Gidon Kremer's commitment to the music of our own time and the exploration of some of the lesserknown byways of the past is justly famous. Here, alongside his Kremerata Baltica colleagues, he turns his attention to three substantial works for strings by the twentieth-century Czech composer Viktor Kalabis. This is an album guaranteed to win new friends for the music.

Vinyl Edition Reissue

The Gesualdo Six/Owain Park - "Radiant Dawn". For their tenth Hyperion album, award-winning vocal supergroup The Gesualdo Six combine voices and trumpet to unearth the spirit of the surprise 1990s hit ECM album 'Officium' (Jan Garbarek & The Hilliard Ensemble), launched when G6 director Owain Park was still in the cradle. Exploring fresh sound worlds, this album presents writing old and new, with two compositions commissioned specifically for the release. The Gesualdo Six regularly tour the world, giving 150+ concerts a year. The group has commissioned (and written) over 100 new works from a diverse range of composers and runs regular composition competitions.

Ikon/David Hill - "Howells: King David & Sine nomine". Herbert Howells was perhaps the most distinctive and revered composer of sacred choral music in 20th-century Britain. However, his non-sacred music has been long neglected; this album unearths Howells's little-known secular choral music. 12 of the 14 tracks here represent repertoire that is completely new to UMG. New arrangements by Iain Farrington have been specially made for this recording, including Howells's famous "King David" and the title track "Sine nomine." Ikon comprises the UK's foremost singers brought together to form one superchoir. David Hill MBE has held conducting posts with the Bach Choir, BBC Singers and Yale Schola Cantorum. Featuring starry soloists Ruairi Bowen (tenor), Hilary Cronin (soprano), Charlie Lovell-Jones (violin) and Iain Farrington (piano).

Andrey Gugnin - "Tchaikovsky; Stravinsky: Russian Ballet Suites". Andrey Gugnin presents 4 iconic ballet suites by Tchaikovsky & Stravinsky, in transcriptions for solo piano by Pletnev, Agosti & Stravinsky: The Nutcracker, Petrushka, Sleeping Beauty, and The Firebird. Gugnin was the winner of the Sydney International Piano Competition & BBC Music Magazine Instrumental Award. "My aim with this recording is to assert that piano transcriptions remain compelling not as substitutes for the orchestral originals, but as worthy musical works in their own right." - Andrey Gugnin. 2 CD set.

Mahan Esfahani - "Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1". Mahan Esfahani's hugely ambitious, complete Bach keyboard project reaches it's summit with Book 1 of the WellTempered Clavier. Bach wrote his seminal 48 Preludes & Fugues with a harpsichord in mind; this is a rare chance to hear the music as intended. Recorded on a German double-manual harpsichord built by Huw Saunders and based on an instrument thought to have belonged to Bach. Mahan's discography has thus far garnered a Gramophone Award, two BBC Music Magazine Awards, a Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Opus Klassik Recording of the Year, Diapason d'Or, Choc de Classica and an ICMA, among many other awards. 2 CD set.

Hyperion proudly presents the Complete Haydn String Quartets on period instruments in one 20-CD box set. These acclaimed performances from the London Haydn Quartet combine historically informed performance practice with performing editions published during Haydn's own lifetime. The release celebrates the 25th anniversary of the formation of the London Haydn Quartet.

2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the Nash Ensemble, and Hyperion is celebrating the occasion with a program of Debussy's Sonatas & Prelude ? l'apr's-midi d'un faune. The original album was #1 on the UK Specialist Charts earlier this year, with the Times writing: "Sixty years have told us that with the Nash Ensemble's musicians, whatever their repertoire, nothing can ever really go wrong." Available on 180g vinyl.

HYPERION ROMANTIC PIANO CONCERTO SERIES / VARIOUS

SHOSTAKOVICH: PRELUDES & PIANO SONATA

LET ALL THE WORLD IN EVERY CORNER SING

Never has Bach seemed less dry and more full of fantasy, stated The Telegraph. Mahan Esfahani's mammoth project to record the complete keyboard works of Bach reaches it's zenith with The Complete Keyboard Concertos. At every stage in the series, Esfahani has sought to challenge long-held assumptions about the composer we seek to know. By teaming up with the Britten Sinfonia, he dispels any assumptions that the harpsichord might be seen as an "ancient" instrument, eschewing period instruments in favor of modern ones. In his typically scholarly but engaging liner notes, Esfahani writes of Bach the trendsetter, putting the keyboard front and center in a concerto for the first time. In addition to his roles as harpsichordist and director, Esfahani adds a compositional feather to his cap with the first recording of his own reconstruction of the "lost concerto" No. 8 (BWV1059), once available only as a small fragment. 2-CD set.

Sir Stephen Hough's 2026 solo piano album, Stephen Hough's Piano Postcards, explores the world from the perspective of the itinerant pianist sending home musical messages from his voyages. Music from Asia includes "Spring breeze prelude" by Taiwanese composer Deng Yu-Hsien and a piano version of "Aka tombo," a children's song so beloved in Japan that it features in citywide "5-o'clock chimes" across the country. Folk and popular traditions appear in "Cielito lindo" and "Nature boy," while the final group of pieces turns to nature, with works by MacDowell, Schumann and Sinding. Alongside these musical travel diaries, he intersperses new transcriptions of songs from popular films, including arrangements he created for Lang Lang's 'Disney Book' album. This is the first chance Sir Stephen has had to include piano arrangements of songs from Frozen, Coco and Mary Poppins.