Hewitt remains today's finest exponent of Bach's keyboard music, declared the renowned English magazine, Gramophone. It is therefore high time that Angela Hewitt's complete Bach recordings, made for the Hyperion label over a period of almost 25 years, were released together for the first time in a box set. Between 1994 and 2018, she recorded 27 CDs, all of which are presented in their original covers in this comprehensive box set. The Goldberg Variations, The Well-Tempered Clavier and the six partitas are each included in two interpretations, inviting listeners to make exciting comparisons. The box set also features Bach arrangements, as well as all the piano concertos performed with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Tognetti. The accompanying booklet contains a new article by Angela Hewitt herself, as well as a work index to help listeners navigate the collection.

LOPES-GRACA: GLOSAS & OTHER PIANO WORKS

Child's Play is a double album of chamber music by Australian composer Carl Vine, one of the most approachable and prolific composers of our day. Vine's output embraces 8 symphonies, 13 concertante works, numerous chamber works, plus music for film, television, dance and theatre. This album marks the final recording of the Goldner String Quartet, whose members have chosen to honor the occasion in the company of friends, including longtime collaborator Piers Lane. The album's title is taken from the String Quartet No 6. In the liner notes, written by the composer himself, Vine writes of being commissioned to create music that "uplifted, edified and elated."

Stephen Layton and his Trinity College Choir forces bring their superabundant talents to bear on the 'B Minor Mass'. The results - as only to be expected from this team - are wonderfully good.

Christopher Tye is less famous than his Tudor contemporary Thomas Tallis and his documented life more chaotic, but the caliber of his Masses and polyphony are unsurpassed for color, full-textured fabric and interwoven melodic lines. The music may be English but the five members of Cinquecento ('16th century' in Italian) are pan-European, each bringing a lifetime of early music experience to forgotten masterpieces. This is their 17th album for Hyperion. Tye successfully negotiated the perilous politics of an era when successive monarchs, from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, pulled England back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism, and demanded that church music bend accordingly. The Peterhouse Mass recorded here survives in partbooks found in the Cambridge college of the same name; the missing tenor part has been reconstructed by Paul Doe.

Her first solo recital, and it's a triumph, concluded the Times in it's 5-star review of one of 2024's Top 20 Classical Albums. Forming part of Mishka Rushdie Momen's mission to restore a fuller picture of English Renaissance music after the 'cultural vandalism' of the Tudor Reformation, this chart-topping debut album makes a powerful case for playing these early keyboard works with the full expressive joy of a modern Steinway.

Stephen Hough's four Rachmaninov Piano Concertos have long been viewed as reference recordings of this iconic repertoire, the standard by which others must be judged. Bolstered by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Litton, Hough made a conscious return to the fast and lean performance tradition of the composer himself, avoiding the sentimental 'Hollywood' approach that had become so prevalent, for this triumphantly successful, awards-lavished Rachmaninov cycle. A 3LP set.

VIVALDI: THE COMPLETE SACRED MUSIC

BACH: THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER I

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 Gunter 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 Compere, 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.