Classical Music

Intense, emotional and pure is how Pavel Kolesnikov describes the experience of making this recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. It is the fruit of a collaboration between the pianist and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. The spirit of the dance, so fundamental to Bach, is never far away in this compelling new account.

Classical Music

Mining the rich musical seam of the Low Countries, Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble have once again unearthed sixteenth-century treasure in the works of Lupus Hellinck and Johannes Lupi.

Soprano Harriet Burns makes her recording debut on volume eight of Hyperion's Complete Brahms Songs series. The program's selections provide the ideal showcase for Burns's voice and Graham Johnson's customary scholarly booklet notes are an indispensable companion.

Youthful piano quintets from Korngold, the arch-Romantic, and Bartók, in his pre-modernist vein, make a fascinating comparison. This album, from Piers Lane and the Goldner String Quartet, offers a snapshot of early twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian chamber music as represented by two of it's most individual voices.

The lush foliage of Juan Esquivel's 'enclosed garden' is expertly tended by de Profundis, who reveal the neglected output of another master of the Spanish Renaissance.

Classical Music

The titular 'lion of nobility' was (probably) King John II of France, making the most expansive work on this album a lament for a historical event: the French defeat at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Elsewhere, Machaut's protagonist continues to scrutinize the joys and sorrows of courtly love in obsessive detail.

MacMillan's Viola Concerto was written for Lawrence Power, who brings a unique authority to it's first recording. A major addition to the repertoire, the fourth symphony is a generous and appropriate coupling. Both works incorporate and transform musical elements from the distant past.

Under Mahan Esfahani's hands - and occasionally fists - the harpsichord is transmogrified into an elemental force, by turns supported or menaced by an astonishing arsenal of electronics. Concerned listeners please note: no harpsichords were harmed in the making of this album.

The choral versions of La mort dOphélie and Sara la baigneuse may be relative rarities on record but both are vintage Berlioz, short and striking, which should be much better known. Yet further incentive to acquire a terrific account of the Symphonie fantastique.

Beginning in 1900 with Richard Henry Walthew and ending in 1999 with David Bedford, the intrepid musical journey undertaken by Laurence Perkins and friends celebrates the extraordinary versatility of the twentieth-century bassoon.

Classical Music

Gerald Finley and Julius Drake return to Schumann, following a magisterially intense Dichterliebe which won them a third Gramophone award. Here they focus on the two contrasting Liederkreis (song-circle) cycles based upon texts by Heine and Eichendorff. Heine's poetry in Schumann's Op.24 contains extremes of elation and despair that call all of Finley's considerable dramatic powers into play. Eichendorff's seductive, crepuscular 'night-songs' of Op.39 require the velvety tone for which this singer is equally revered. Separating these two great works are the Sechs Gedichte aus dem Liederbuch eines Malers, which find Schumann in more homespun, folksong-influenced vein.

Telemann may have written his twelve fantasias for the amateur market, but he would surely have rejoiced to hear such superlative performances as these. Alina Ibragimova again demonstrates just what can be accomplished on the four strings of a solo violin.

However cultivated the European centers of Habsburg imperial power may have been, few could regularly have boasted musicians of the caliber of Cinquecento. On this release, their ongoing exploration of Franco-Flemish repertoire from the sixteenth century uncovers major works by Johannes de Cleve and Jacobus Vaet.

On Volume 5 of Howard Shelley's complete Mendelssohn piano music series, he continues to overturn the conventional wisdom about the composer's unjustly neglected piano music, again demonstrating convincingly it's claims on our attention.

Classical Music

A re-creation of the music combined with a technological reconstruction of the acoustics in Linlithgow Chapel, this project from The Binchois Consort and Andrew Kirkman offers a fascinating perspective on how such repertoire might originally have been heard.

Classical Music

This album's program represents one phenomenal composer-pianist's homage to another. Marc-André Hamelin has long been a champion of the music of Samuil Feinberg. Hamelin's performances are sensitive to all it's shadows and anxieties while being fully equal to the prodigious technical demands.

Francisco Guerrero is still insufficiently well known by comparison to his great contemporary and compatriot Victoria. El Le�n de Oro here affirms his rightful place in the history of the Golden Age of Spanish polyphony.

Classical Music

In this wonderfully planned programme the whimsical poetry of York Bowen's Hans Andersen 'fragments'-music for a fully-fledged technique, despite the fairy-tale titles-is pleasingly complemented by the bravura of the studies. Nicolas Namoradze proves more than equal to the demands of both.