Glacial Voyage is an evocative exploration of sound and memory, brought to life by the dynamic collaboration between guitarist Christy Doran and pianist Izumi Kimura.�The album paints vivid sonic landscapes, reminiscent of the rhythmic push and pull of waves upon a shore or the quiet contemplation of a starlit coastline.

Sophie Dervaux, the first female bassoonist of the illustrious Vienna Philharmonic, continues her captivating exploration of Vivaldi's Bassoon Concerti. In this latest release, Dervaux masterfully continues her journey through Vivaldi's enchanting works, showcasing her exceptional talent and artistry. Accompanied by the esteemed La Folia Baroque Orchestra, renowned for their commitment to historically informed performances on period instruments, this album offers a fresh and authentic interpretation of Vivaldi's timeless compositions. The orchestra's expertise enhances Dervaux's virtuosic playing, bringing a vibrant energy and richness to each concerto.

For his debut album, Arsenis Selalmazidis has chosen works by Schnittke, Ravel and Faure because their work had a profound influence on him. All the pieces are arranged in such a way that the difference between the musical eras is barely noticeable. With this album, it is important to him to give listeners the opportunity to slow down and pause for a moment in the hectic rhythm of modern music.

Goteborg Baroque Magnus Kjellson The long-awaited release of Goteborg Baroque's recording of Dietrich Buxtehude's "Membra Jesu Nostri" is finally out! This legendary musical work has been interpreted countless times, and yet Goteborg Baroque brings something new to the table. Recorded in arstads kyrka outside the Swedish town of Falkenberg, artistic director Magnus Kjellson and his group of musicians succeed in delivering an intimate and genuine rendition of "Membra Jesu Nostri", with the unmistakable quality that the ensemble has become acclaimed for: the live feeling, that of being in the room with the musicians even when listening to a recording. Goteborg Baroque is pleased to share a most human and heartfelt interpretation of one of the most wondrous works in music history.

Segovia is Carlotta Dalia's debut album on Berlin Classics - as the first female guitarist in the label's artist roster. The programme is recorded with Carlotta Dalia playing the 1939 Hermann Hauser I guitar, that was originally built for Andres Segovia. There are only two Hermann Hauser guitars existing, one is currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The album contains works for solo guitar by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Pedrell, Haug, Ibert, Torroba, Turina and Segovia himself, plus one new commissioned piece by Enrico Melozzi, written especially for Carlotta Dalia.

Chinese pianist Nariga Nogi, in live recordings of piano works by Haydn, Liszt, Debussy, and Chopin.

Discover the bold and innovative chamber music of Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen (b. 1976) in this retrospective release featuring the Oslo Sinfonietta under the direction of Christian Eggen and Rei Munakata. Spanning 2001-2007, the album presents Praesens, Besides, Amid�and Chambered Music - works that redefine musical space, texture, and gesture with striking precision and playful intensity. Through his masterful exploration of instrumental theatre and sonic materiality, we hear Steen-Andersen's distinctive voice take shape.

Songs for Stephen represents a nearly three-decade collaboration between esteemed composer Elena Ruehr and celebrated baritone Stephen Salter's. Elena describes the time "a handsome and charismatic young man approached me after a premiere of one of my compositions at Boston University. He asked me to write him a song cycle for his debut recital with the Bank of Boston's Celebrity Series. I told him to send me a recording of his singing and I'd think about it. The first note I heard Stephen sing sent a bolt of energy down my spine: this was the singer I had always wanted to write for!" Stephen reciprocates, "What a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration has landed in my life both professionally and personally with Elena. From my first personal musical envelopment of her first song ever written for me, I truly fell in love with her creations for me, and thus we began this truly special and unique journey." Elena evocatively sets some of America's most notable poets, including Cuban-American and National Humanities Medal recipient Richard Blanco who read his own work at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama, himself a subject of Five Men in Guggenheim Fellow Elizabeth Alexander's encapsulation of two centuries' worth of multiple African-Americans experiences. Leading light of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes and feminist-activist Adrienne Rich lend their lyrics to poetry for children, both dark and light. The addition of the four-minute bonbon Lied, set to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, is a reference to Elena's Germanic ancestry as well as the first song, by Schubert, that Elena heard Stephen sing. As with all of their collaborations over the years, Songs for Stephen brings Elena's evocative music to effervescent life by the baritone's sumptuous voice.

THE CITY AND THE SEA project is a bridge connecting artists from two corners of the world - a valued American choirmaster and composer, originator of the idea of a virtual choir, Eric Whitacre, and a young Cracow composer - Klaudia Rabiega. The presented works were mostly composed to texts by well-known Anglo-Saxon poets. The compositions fit into the genre of vocal and instrumental chamber music in which the choir is equivalent to the other instruments with the piano keeping the whole together. Klaudia Rabiega knows how to compose choral music; she is perfectly at ease in the polyphonic vocal texture, and her musical language evolves in search of a balance between modern and creative style and simple language accessible to listeners. The project, which includes world premiere recordings, was implemented by excellent musicians associated with the Cracow music scene, and the whole was supervised by the charismatic conductor Andrzej Korzeniowski.

Mainstays of Spanish and South American guitar music in a rediscovered rare recording In Prague at the turn of September and October 1969, for four days Supraphon's legendary Domovina studio was the home of the 37-year-old Konrad Ragossnig. The guitarist was in top form; he had studied in Spain under Andres Segovia, the "king of the classical guitar", had won the ORTF competition in Paris, and was teaching guitar in Basel at the Musik-Akademie and in Vienna at the Universitat fur Musik und darstellende Kunst. He was giving solo concerts and appearing with orchestras around Europe, the USA, and the Far East. Besides the classical guitar, he had also mastered the Renaissance lute when interest in early music and it's authentic interpretation was just reawakening in western Europe. His chamber music partners included tenor Peter Schreier and flautist Hans Martin Linde. Now in the Prague studio, Ragossnig returned to mainstays of Spanish and South American guitar music. Some of the pieces are written specifically for his instrument, while others (Albeniz, Granados) are piano works that first became truly famous in guitar transcriptions. In the beautiful acoustics of the Domovina Studio, the recording team captured all the superb qualities (beauty of tone, flawless technical brilliance, subtle inflections of rhythm, dynamics, and articulation) that make his playing and this recording special. Over half a century later, this recording remains a rare gem documenting the guitar literature.

Following the critical acclaim of her first album, Lueurs, released just a year ago by Cypres, the young Belgian composer Apolline Jesupret is back with a second monographic CD entitled Bleu Ardent. This time, the idea originated in the mind of Maya Levy, the night following the creation of the violin concerto Ardeurs Intimes, where the violinist dreamed with the tenacious conviction of the unconscious of an album performed by the two of them. She tirelessly worked on it, developing ideas and proposals, and performs half of the pieces on the record. This concerto is inspired by the inner state one can feel in a love relationship with another. Throughout the work, the contrasting energies that cross the soul find their echo in the music. Bleue, Apolline's first symphonic work, is the color of our planet, of the ocean, and of the rolling wave: we hear strength and fragility, caress and slap, the energy of life and the threat of death - the surprising end, like a corkscrew, like a scorpion's tail. Dans l'air du soir, for solo violin, evokes, from Apolline's admiration for Claude Debussy, seven sharp scents with poetically evocative titles. Inspired by the paintings of painter and composer Julie Theriault, de Glace and de Lave are part of a cycle of sound studies for the piano. The first explores the cold, immutable, and crystalline texture of an iceberg, while the second aims to trace the different states of lava in a magmatic energy and in the force of a volcanic eruption.

From a formal point of view, this is a classical jazz quartet line-up, complemented by a string quartet. Shogo Seifert considers the group to be a unit of eight and has composed for them accordingly. A rather handcrafted, rationally "technical" approach is foreign to him. "I need an emotional connection to transfer energy into music."

The Eton Choirbook is recognised as one of the UK's national treasures - an extraordinary survival of the religious iconoclasm which swept away so many choral institutions and musical manuscripts as well as a great deal of beautiful art, architecture, sculpture, stone carving, stained glass, and embroidery from the colourful, pre-Reformation world. The Eton Choirbook originally contained ninety-three works by twenty-five composers who hailed variously from Eton, Windsor, Eton's sister foundation at King's College, Cambridge, Oxford, and the Royal Court. It was compiled, with great care and no expense spared, and completed around 1504/5. But what makes the Eton Choirbook so special for both listener and performer is that the music it contains is hauntingly beautiful. There really is nothing like it in continental music of the time which the 'Eton' works surpass in scale (some last over fifteen minutes), number of voice parts, and use of wide vocal ranges - as well as the high degree of melodic invention and rhythmic complexity which places them beyond the reach of most choirs nowadays. � Russell Blacker

The Massachusetts based Ecce Ensemble, directed by composer John Aylward, releases this composer portrait album of Trevor Weston's chamber music, Remembrances. Weston's music aims to be transformative regardless of aesthetic, and he seamlessly integrates influences from a wide range of sources into his attractive, cohesive musical language.

The Second Symphony of the Swiss composer Richard Flury (1896-1967) is deeply bound up with his personal life. In 1932 his first marriage broke up, and his wife and four children left Solothurn in the north to settle in Ticino, in the south. Through visits to his family in Lugano Flury grew to know the area well, so much so that he decided to celebrate their new surroundings in his Second Symphony, the movements of which are based on the carillon of the Flury family's local church and three Ticino folksongs. Structurally, the work belongs to the Brucknerian tradition, but it also has points of contact with the orchestral nature-painting of Flury's good friend Joseph Marx. The landscape of the Poeme nocturne is an interior one: it is an expansive dream-fantasy of occasionally violent passions, a worthy cousin of Richard Strauss' tone-poems.