Following a critically acclaimed recording of 'The Great', the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and it's conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continue their survey of Schubert's orchestral music with Symphonies Nos. 5 & 8. If the slender No. 5 looks back at Mozart - it was composed in 1816, the year Schubert discovered the composer's chamber music - the 'Unfinished' No. 8 is a daring foray that distances itself from Schubert's earlier symphonies. The programme closes with the Rondo in A major, D. 438, featuring the SCO's Leader, Stephanie Gonley, as soloist. Widely known for their spontaneity and sensitivity, the SCO and Emelyanychev are a match made in heaven when it comes to Schubert.

Following it's first album for Linn - a recording of motets by the English expatriates Philips and Dering - The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, travels a few centuries forward, turning now to the vibrant and engaging choral music by it's Director of Music, Matthew Martin. The album showcases a collection of works written between 2004 and 2022, which includes some world premiere recordings. From simple mass and motet settings to more complex festival anthems and canticles, the music is broadly and unabashedly composed as an extension to a familiar twentieth-century English idiom, his varied style traversing both the Anglican and Catholic traditions with hints of less familiar European chant and polyphony. This is music choirs will wholeheartedly add to their repertoire.

Classical Music

Yuletide is the mid-winter period from Hannuka, through Christmas, to the celebration of Twelfth Night. From the late 1950s through the 1970s it was seemingly obligatory for all artists from Jazz to Punk to make a Christmas album. With Yuletide Treats, Duo Pleyel joins that spirit and tradition, with some of the greatest classical hits for your festive delight. Comprising keyboardists Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya and Richard Egarr, Duo Pleyel begins with three beautiful, transcendental and intimate movements from Franz Liszt's 'Christmas Tree Suite'. Then follows 'For unto us a child is born' and 'Hallelujah' from Handel's Messiah. No New Year's celebration is complete without the Strauss family's 'Blue Danube' and 'Radetzky March'. Finally, they present Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker Suite'. All performed on a Chris Maene Straight Strung Concert Grand, this album is to be listened to at high volume with a large glass of something delicious.

Handel's arrival in Rome seems to have had a miraculous influence on his development as a composer. Something about the eternal city ignited the most productive period of his entire career: there Handel worked with some of the greatest musicians of the age and enjoyed the favours of major patrons of the arts. There he also witnessed the clerical aristocracy's sensual enjoyment of those very luxuries, excesses, and trappings of beauty that they professed to deny in their sermons. In Handel in Rome, Dunedin Consort and it's director John Butt set out to convey Handel's response to this stimulating and somewhat paradoxical environment with three Italian cantatas. Winner of the Rising Talent award at the 2022 International Opera Awards, Nardus Williams is the star soprano.

Barbara Hannigan, a Grammy award-winning artist at the forefront of creation, leads an ensemble of outstanding young musicians from the Royal Academy of Music and The Juilliard School. Since 2002, the Academy and The Juilliard School, both international leaders in their field, have enjoyed a special and fruitful friendship based on 20 years of performances, exchanges and recordings. In this latest collaboration, Hannigan directs students from both institutions in an all-Stravinsky programme, including the Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, Ragtime and Three Japanese Lyrics. Recently appointed the Reinbert de Leeuw Professor of Music at the Academy, Hannigan conducts this transatlantic group in a wonderfully intelligent and engaging programme of Stravinsky's most iconic ensemble repertoire.

Originally released in 2002 and now re-issued as part of Linn’s ECHO series, Sarah Moule's debut album 'It's a Nice Thought' features 14 songs by Fran Landesman and Simon Wallace, who together produced over 300 songs during an eight-year working relationship. Since she began performing with her quartet in 2002, Sarah has established a growing reputation as one of Britain’s most exciting jazz vocal talents, exhibiting an emotionally-direct vocal style, gutsy swing and sensitivity. “A sweet, beguiling voice and cool delivery…captures the tone of these songs to perfection.” Jazzwise

Classical Music

Classical Music

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Classical Music

Clarinetist Lesley Schatzberger and the Fitz William string quartet, both of whom have established well-deserved reputations for thoughtfully delivered and historically considered performances, present works by Brahms, Mozart, Glazunov and Sweeney. originally released in 2007 'Brahms: clarinet quintet' has been re-issued as part of Linn's echo series which offers a second chance to enjoy the best of the label's award-winning catalogue. at the centre piece is the Brahms clarinet quintet in b minor, which in their hands carries particular historical significance. Brahms was originally inspired to write the quintet after hearing clarinet player Richard Muhlfeld perform. Lesley Schatzberger performs on a specially-made copy made of Muhlfeld's own clarinet and the performers adhere to certain aspects of performance practice which were in favor at that time, while embracing Brahms's attitude to rhythm, tempo, and Rubato creating a truly authentic feel. the program also includes a rare Mozart quintet movement in b flat major, completed by Duncan Druce, which is one of several unfinished Mozart works which are still being realized today, as well as Glazunov's haunting reverie oriental and an Og-Mhadainn (the young morning) by Scottish contemporary composer William Sweeney. founded in 1968 by four Cambridge undergraduates, the Fitzwilliam string quartet first became well known through their close personal association with Dmitri Shostakovich, who entrusted them with the western premieres of his last three quartets. Lesley Schatzberger has been at the forefront of historical instrument performance since her student days and has taken part in pioneering performances of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven on period instruments. 'everything about this reading is so beautifully shaded and perfectly balanced...' (fanfare)

This recording brings together Florian Boesch, one of today’s foremost Lieder interpreters, and Malcolm Martineau, who is widely recognized as one of the leading accompanists of his generation. With a partnership honed over many concerts and several recordings together, including a Grammy-nominated Die schöne Mullerin, the pair turn their attention to two of the greatest song cycles of the nineteenth century. The recording opens with Schumann’s Op. 39, Liederkreis, settings of Joseph von Eichendorff’s poems, and finishes with Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, written around forty years later. The songs selected all tell, in varying hues, of the Romantic individual’s sense of alienation from others and of transcendence, or the longing for it. An expressive and accomplished storyteller Boesch’s perceptive phrasing and exquisite range of colours is well matched by Martineau’s virtuosic and perfectly synchronized accompaniment.

Two super groups - the strings led by violinist Markus Däunert (leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra), and the winds led by oboeist Nicholas Daniel (whose distinguished career began with him being named BBC Young Musician of the Year) - combine in this, their second recording for Linn. A counterpart to the Aldeburgh Strings course, whose recording of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings launched this partnership in 2016, Aldeburgh Winds offered an opportunity for exceptional wind and brass players to work intensively alongside leading international professionals. Strauss poured out some of his most heartfelt inspiration in Metamorphosen, a 25-minute string masterpiece written as an elegy in the wake of Germany’s destruction in the Second World War. In complete contrast the Serenade radiates Mozartian bonhomie combined with Strauss’s exquisite chamber scoring which provides a tantalising glimpse of the composer to come. The Symphony for Wind Instruments (‘Fröhliche Werkstatt’) adds a third clarinet, basset horn and bass clarinet to the Serenade’s line-up and is very important work in the wind ensemble repertory. The Aldeburgh Strings/Wind ensembles are a product of the Britten–Pears Young Artist Programme, founded over forty years ago by Britten and Pears, in order to provide high-level performance training for the world’s best emerging professional musicians. Tutors are drawn from some of the world’s finest orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Philharmonia and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and direct the ensemble sections from within, in an inspiring dual role of mentor and performer.

Having won acclaim for his recent recordings of French repertoire, Robin Ticciati now turns to the music of Anton Bruckner. Ticciati is well suited to conducting Bruckner with an approach that is both 'expansive and revelatory' (The Guardian). Having already performed this work with the Bergen Philharmonic and Vienna Symphony Orchestras, Ticciati returned to Berlin to continue his recording series with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester. Bruckner broke new ground with his Sixth Symphony; it's meandering harmonies, intricate rhythms and imaginative instrumentation are coupled with contrasting moods and a theme that moves satisfyingly from dark to light. Occasionally overshadowed by the more familiar Fifth and Seventh symphonies, the Sixth has many extraordinary moments, including the astonishing Scherzo. Notably this was the first work that the self-doubting composer did not seek to revise. Ticciati describes this symphony as 'wild, daring and risky', a perfect pairing for this engaging and charismatic conductor.