Dacw 'Nghariad (there is my love) is a beautful Welsh folk song that I discovered whilst working on a cantata for the Aldeburgh Festival based on the Welsh myth of Lyn y Fan Fach. The song is about longing; longing for something that is unreachable and distant, for the moment at least. � Gavin Higgins

The musical language of Bernd Stegmann (*1952) moves in seemingly very different stylistic spheres: Elements of old a cappella culture stand next to hammered recitativo passages, big band effects next to minimal music sections, medieval-sounding drone fifths next to palatable Latin jazz harmonies. These heterogeneous building blocks are held together by an all-embracing motoric structure.

For generations, the noble family of the House of Szechenyi have played a decisive role in shaping Hungary's destiny. Katharina Ruckgaber and Tamas Egresi, accompanied by Helmut Deutsch, have compiled a representative selection of songs from the large repertoire of poems and compositions; an impressive testimony to the wide-ranging interests and talents of one of Europe's most important aristocratic families.

Wind Takes Flight began with a simple yet powerful idea: to reimagine the music of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century mystic and composer, through the lens of modern electronic soundscapes. The title, drawn from one of Hildegard's sacred poems featured on the album, also reflects her love of birds and the natural world. These have been enduring sources of inspiration for us throughout this creative journey. As collaborators, we, - Julia Sinclair, an English soprano soloist, and Marijn Cinjee, a Dutch electronic musician - were drawn to the timeless spirituality and beauty of Hildegard's work. The idea of bringing together our two musical worlds to create something new and transformative felt both exciting and inevitable. In April 2023, we debuted an experimental live improvisation inspired by Hildegard's hymn O ignis Spiritus paracliti at Stone Nest in London, in an immersive listening experience using more than 40 loudspeakers driven by the 4DSOUND spatial sound system. The audience's response to the soaring vocal lines and immersive electronic textures confirmed that we were onto something special, and that performance became the foundation for Wind Takes Flight, the album's title track. Over the next eighteen months, we poured ourselves into this project, crafting what would become Wind Takes Flight. The album is a conversation across time - beginning with Hildegard's chants and evolving into a love letter to her music, merging her sacred compositions with contemporary sound design while remaining true to the deep spirituality and reverence of her music. Premiering the album live in spatial sound at Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam was an unforgettable experience, captured in the drama and beauty of Ekstasis, a piece created for that performance. Now, we're thrilled to share Wind Takes Flight with you. This album is more than music; it's a bridge between past and present, an invitation to step into a space where ancient echoes meet modern innovation, and where the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen - artist, composer, and pioneer - soars anew.

Though he was admired by figures as illustrious as Rossini and Verdi, violinist-composer Giuseppe Austri has been largely forgotten, unlike his great contemporaries Paganini, Sivori and Bazzini. These premiere recordings show how inventive and virtuosic his works for violin and piano are, suggesting that he must have been a performer of transcendent technical and expressive abilities. Austri was in the mould of the great itinerant virtuosi of his time and, though his compositions can display Paganini-like writing, he matches incendiary passages with graceful cantabile and intimate delicacy.

This abum contains the premiere recording of 6 Sonatas, Op. 63, originally published in 1737 (edition published by Atelier Philidor in 2021). The compositions are exquisite and expressive and have not been heard since the mid- 18th century since the engraved score has only recently been discovered. They are quintessentially French in their general musical style, making extensive use of prescribed ornamentation. The pardessus de viole enjoyed a considerable vogue in France towards the middle of the 18th century. For too long the pardessus de viole, which has an almost indentical range to the violin, has been commonly regarded - even without being heard - as a kind of toy instrument. Now we know otherwise after experiencing how similar, except for it's different register, the pardessus instrument is to all the other members of it's family, including the familiar bass viol. The recent discovery of Boismortier's Op. 63 for two 6-string pardessus de viole is an exciting and important find and FHR are very happy to publish the first recording.

Valentin Silvestrov was forced to leave his native Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022. His music has a prescient quality that unerringly seems to express the fate of his homeland. The intimate Violin Concerto and the heartfelt, single-span Eighth Symphony are notable for their economy of expression and emphasis on beauty, depth and harmony. This is music that hovers on the edge of silence in an uplifting homage to love and humanity, hope and renewal.

This live recording immortalizes Christophe Rousset's performance at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid on January 8, 2025, a featured event in the Earning a Living concert series. Francois Couperin's keyboard compositions illuminate the role of royal patronage as the modus vivendi for musicians of the Early Modern period. Couperin's treatise, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, is here interwoven with a selection of his Pieces de clavecin, giving rise to a portrait gallery in music, each inspired by anonymous figures who inhabited the French court. This set of pieces de caractere, whose allusive and encoded meanings remain largely enigmatic today, is presented in groupings by tonality, each offering a window into the refined world of Baroque palace life and it's intricate web of connections.

A new choral album of radiant melody and profound reflection Composer James Woodhall presents�Full of Grace, a deeply expressive new choral album that moves between the intimate and the exultant. Drawing inspiration from sacred texts, ancient prayers, and moments of divine revelation, this collection weaves together contemporary choral writing with timeless spiritual themes. The album opens with the title track,�Full of Grace, a lyrical meditation on the Angel Gabriel's greeting to Mary and the incarnation. With warm harmonies and a memorable, flowing melody, the piece captures both the stillness and the awe of that encounter, while it's vibrant central section echoes the heavenly proclamation to the shepherds. At the heart of the album lies�The Damascus Sequence�- an 11-movement cantata chronicling Saul's dramatic conversion from persecutor to preacher, drawn closely from Acts 9. This narrative arc, from darkness to vision, turmoil to peace, is vividly painted in choral textures, duets, and solos. Tracks such as�Murderous Threats,�I am Jesus, and�Saul Sees and is Saved�reflect Woodhall's gift for text-setting and storytelling through music, bringing ancient scripture to life with a keen sense of pacing and atmosphere. Later in the album, Woodhall returns to the Nativity in�The Shepherds' Carol, a haunting and intimate new text that juxtaposes pastoral imagery with celestial wonder. His setting of�Ave Verum Corpus�and�Ave Maria�offers fresh interpretations of these enduring texts, while the final track,�Light from Light, closes the album with a vision of hope and illumination - a reflection on divine presence in the world. Rooted in the choral tradition yet unmistakably contemporary,�Full of Grace�is a compelling addition to the sacred repertoire. It's accessible yet distinctive language will resonate with listeners who appreciate the choral music of James MacMillan, John Tavener, and Morten Lauridsen. For broadcasters, curators, and critics,�Full of Grace�offers music that is both spiritually resonant and musically rewarding - ideal for sacred seasons, reflective programming, and those seeking new choral music that speaks with clarity and depth.

The live album by Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh is dedicated to the memory of his father, who died in 2024, but it also celebrates the musical friendship between the four musicians, who first played together in New York in 2006. Many of the pieces on his album were composed during the Syrian uprising in 2011 and are characterised by anger and sadness, but also by unwavering optimism and hope. Azmeh is convinced that making music is an act of freedom and has ultimately prevailed against violence and tyranny in Syria.

This CD uses early and late songs, three excerpts from the successful opera Astorga, a piano arrangement of the best-known orchestral work Columbus, the only two organ pieces and excerpts from his String Quartet Op. 25 to create a comprehensive panorama of Johann Joseph Abert's (1832-1915) multifaceted oeuvre from the Prague years to 1879.

This production is dedicated to the works of two American composers, of whom Morten Lauridsen is certainly the better known in Germany. His choral work O magnum mysterium (1994) in particular has become one of the hits of contemporary choral literature in recent years. Lauridsen (born 1943) grew up in Portland, Oregon, the son of Danish immigrants. The songs of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers were very present in his home. He initially studied English and history and worked as a fireman. He then turned his attention entirely to music and moved to the University of Southern California, where, after graduating, he taught music theory and later became a professor of composition. As a creator of primarily vocal music he received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 2007. From 1994 to 2001, he was composer in residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, one of the leading professional choirs in the USA, which also premiered his Lux aeterna. All five movements of this cycle refer to the "Eternal Light". While Lauridsen was setting the underlying liturgical texts to music, his mother was dying - but the words about light as a universal symbol of all-encompassing enlightenment gave him consolation. Jake Runestad is one of the latest additions to the list of great American composers and is in the process of securing his place in US music history. Born in 1986 in Rockford, Illinois, he grew up in a family that sang a lot. There was also a piano, and during his primary school years he began to play little melodies on it - also teaching himself Scott Joplin's The Entertainer. From 2009 to 2011, he studied at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, after which he quickly gained recognition, especially in the field of choral music. However, his catalogue of works also includes operas, orchestral pieces and chamber music. He has received commissions from the Washington National Opera, the vocal ensemble VOCES8 and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others. His first album, The Hope of Loving, was immediately nominated for a Grammy Award. A keen mountaineer and camper, Runestad finds nature a great source of inspiration. In his Earth Symphony, Mother Earth herself is given a voice; the five interrelated sections deal with her destruction, her sorrow, her healing, and also her hope for humanity.

The poetic dimension of the three pieces in this album is certainly the listening experience. The two scores that "compose" the music (two because the first and third pieces use the same one) are nothing more than a framework: a very limited number of directions given to the musicians and the conductor, mostly consisting of short melodic or harmonic fragments positioned in boxes (what is called Rahmen-Notation in German) that extend for the entire duration of a section. To bring a piece to life, each performer must perceive what the others are playing, in a relationship of independence-dependence. This is because the composer expressly requests that each musician performs any melodic fragment, whenever they wish, however they wish, and in whatever order they wish, thus in a context of absolute autonomy. At the same time, this fragment is performed alongside other fragments played by other musicians, and it relates to them, creating an interconnectedness among the parts involved. This is most likely the attitude that Rita Ueda invites us to adopt, directing our attention and perception towards it. A choice of sharing also suggested by the meeting of three different musical cultures, represented in these pieces by the solo instruments, each coming from a different musical tradition, alongside the traditional Western orchestra: the Persian tar, the Chinese guzheng, and the Japanese sho.

Stradivarius is pleased to present the new album by Aurora Avveduto, a young pianist who has enriched her training by participating, among other things, in various masterclasses and seminars with composers and performers of today's music. Entitled Stille, the CD invites you on a journey that intertwines music from different sources (Japan, China, the United States, Italy) brought together around the theme of the Far East and the images of permanence that derive from it, with pieces that investigate the theme of time and suggest moments of reflection in a delicate dimension of suspension. The CD, which opens with China Gates by John Adams, a composer of the second generation of minimal music, is configured as a concept album centered on a certain vision of music and the world that has roots in the Far East but which then also touches the cultures of other countries. After the songs by Toru Takemitsu Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II, from 1982 and 1992 respectively, and after Eight Memories in Watercolor (1978-1979) by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, born in 1957, the album closes with two compositions by two Italian authors, Pioggia d'autunno by Federico Maria Sardelli, a multifaceted musician, painter and writer, and Stille by Giorgio Colombo Taccani, a song from 2022 that gives the title to the entire CD, for a singular listening path that creates bridges and links between the cultures of different countries.

When several of the greatest minds in modern music join forces, the result is a genre-defying masterpiece. MEMORY OF TOMORROW brings together the virtuosic talents of marimbist Mika Stoltzman, bassist Eddie Gomez, pianists Geoffrey Keezer and Anders Wihk, vibraphonist Mike Mainieri, clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, and drummer Steve Gadd, who doubles as the producer of this all-star album. From the soulful melody of Eric Clapton's Layla to the infectious groove of Gadd's The Duke, the ensemble reimagines iconic works by several of modern history's most celebrated artists, from Sting to Chick Corea and more. A stunning blend of jazz, classical, and contemporary influences, this album is a celebration of virtuosity at it's finest.