This final release in the Complete Songs of Brahms series, featuring soprano Sophie Rennert, epitomizes all the familiar virtues that have distinguished the project: Perfectly judged performances, intelligently planned recitals, informative booklet notes and brilliant accompaniments from Graham Johnson, a true master of the art.

Angela Hewitt's notes for this important new album describe a teenager's moment of revelation when she first came to appreciate the epic masterpiece that is the Liszt Piano Sonata. Here we have a heart-felt recording where this palpable sense of wonder is manifest alongside Hewitt's enthralling technical facility at the keyboard. The program is completed by the second half of Liszt's dazzling second Ann�e de p�lerinage collection: The three Petrarch Sonnets and the noble Dante Sonata, the latter composed as a fund-raiser for the Bonn Beethoven monument in 1839.

A third Hyperion release from top-notch Portuguese choir, Cupertinos, maintains the exceptional standards already set by the first two. This collection of sacred music by Pedro de Cristo includes five first recordings and marks animportant addition to the composer's burgeoning discography.

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.

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Ysaye's Sonatas for solo violin were sketched out in a fevered twenty-four hours during the summer of 1923, a response to the question of why - in over two hundred years - no one had attempted to follow the path forged by Johann Sebastian Bach. Each of these six new Sonatas is dedicated to and customized around the playing style of a contemporary violinist, and as such they present formidable challenges. Russian virtuoso Alina Ibragimova, whose earlier recording of the Bach Sonatas & Partitas was revelatory, turns out performances fully worthy of this distinguished ancestry.

The transcendental heroics of Paganini's Caprices have presented the ultimate test for generations of violinists. Alina Ibragimova's account of this most exclusive repertoire joins a select few of the most celebrated.

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V�clav Jan Krvtitel Tom�ek wrote numerous songs and short piano pieces. His works predate those of his rather more famous near contemporary Franz Schubert by some years but remain mysterious neglected. This enthralling new album from Renata Pokupic and Roger Vignoles unfolds twenty-eight songs of a rare appeal. Tom�ek was one of the very few composers of Goethe settings to meet with the great poet's (relatively) undivided approval.

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The heady, youthful tenor of Robin Tritschler guides listeners through Volume nine of Hyperion's Brahms Complete Songs Series. This rewarding journey, spanning more than three decades of the composer's creative life, is full of musical riches.

A new album from Marc-Andre Hamelin is always cause for celebration. Here in his first Debussy recording for Hyperion Hamelin presents the two books of Images - Debussy's coloristic masterpiece, a bewitching compendium of scents, colors and sounds. Also recorded here is the second book of Preludes, in a poetic and evocative performance.

Cramer's piano concertos were written to showcase his formidable proficiency in the new pianistic techniques and evolving piano technologies of the day. Howard Shelley and the London Mozart Players revisit the composer, delivering persuasive accounts of his Piano Concertos Nos.1, 3 and 6.

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