No wonder the stellar team of pianists Eric Zuber and Boris Slutsky found Rachmaninoff's works for two pianos irresistible. The two had a shared history: Mr. Slutsky was Mr. Zuber's piano teacher beginning when the latter was a mere 11. Here, instructor and student have now become equal partners with a shared aesthetic. "Like many pianists (and listeners), I've always felt deeply connected to Rachmaninoff's music," says Eric Zuber. "Precisely identifying what makes it resonate so profoundly with so many people is challenging, but for me, it's his sincerity of expression, emotional honesty, and exceptional craftsmanship in writing for the piano. Through his distinctive musical language, Rachmaninoff captures the complexities of human emotion-our joys, loves, and sorrows-in ways words alone cannot fully express.

Victor Julien-laferriere and his Consuelo Orchestra continue their complete works of Beethoven's symphonies with a second volume devoted to the famous diptych premiered on 22 December 1808: the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, so contrasting and yet so close. They have added the Eighth, premiered five years later and sometimes considered the little sister of the 'Pastoral', whose key is F major.

Carlo Mazzoli and Silvia Rambaldi, passionate scholars of historical instruments and performance practice of early music, were teachers for many years - respectively of Piano and Harpsichord - at the Conservatorio "G.B. Martini" in Bologna, where they realised numerous teaching and concert projects. They have had a constant point of reference in Maestro Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, with whom they have collaborated assiduously in the activities of the San Colombano Museum in Bologna, which has housed it's collection of historical instruments since 2010; they are both present with some performances, both solo and in duo, in the DVD Il vibrar dell'aria dedicated to the Museum. It was precisely with performances on these ancient instruments that the study of Clementi's works for duo began, leading to this first complete recording.

William Shield rose from relatively humble beginnings to become the 'house' composer to Covent Garden, for which he wrote stage works full of panache and tunefulness. He met and befriended Haydn who was to prove a lasting influence. In 1782 Shield published his Six String Quartets, Op. 3, some of the most richly rewarding works of their type in 18th-century England. The transparency of parts, use of imitation, infusion of Sturm und Drang elements as well as the bucolic and folkloric writing, all demonstrate Shield's art, as does the progressive writing of the last of the six, in C minor.

Are 'hits' exclusively associated with modern pop music? Popular successes have roots much deeper in the history of music, spanning various genres and contexts, including music created and shared in private settings, such as homes, as well as in street performances. Certain compositions' extraordinary popularity is attested by widely distributed, copied, and repeatedly republished scores. The innumerable arrangements for other instruments also attest to the extent of the phenomenon. Following the success of their 2002 album Dvorak (LDV101), and once again in association with the Czech instrumental arranger Jiri Kabat, the Talich Quartet invites us to explore Mitteleuropa's folk repertoire. An invitation to dance. Irresistible!

Since the creation of their ensemble La Nereide in 2019, the three sopranos Camille Allerat, Julie Roset and Ana Vieira Leite have wanted to tell stories about women, women who are courageous, vulnerable, passionate, powerful, secretive - and sometimes all of these at once. Le Coeur et la Raison imagines the fate of a young noblewoman sent to the Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr, where she received a meticulous education, particularly in music; she took part in services and sang works by it's organist Louis-Nicolas Clerambault (1676-1749) - including his magnificent Miserere - and by Jean-Francois Lalouette (1651-1728), a pupil of Lully. When she returned to her family, however, she sang the melodies of fashionable court airs, which she then shared with her fellow students at Saint-Cyr, to the great disapproval of the religious authorities. She and her colleagues then rewrote the song texts transforming the declarations of love into statements of faith. Today, these three friends and artists present an emotionally charged programme, accompanied by a first-rate instrumental trio.

Scott Wollschleger wrote Lost Anthems as part of The 20/19 project, violist Leilehua Lanzilotti's commissioning enterprise. The twenty five minute work is divided into fifteen discrete sections, what Wollschleger describes as "a melodic, song-like structure in search of itself." By titling the works "anthems," Wollschleger invokes a music that is inherently communal and symbolic of something larger than itself; by presenting music that is often introspective, he subverts the bombastic underpinnings of many anthems.

On Lines and Traces of Desire, composer Mischa-Salkind Pearl collaborates with cimbalom artist Nicholas Tolle on this collection of solo, duo, and ensemble works for the beguiling stringed percussion instrument. These mystical, reflective pieces celebrate the cimbalom's resonant qualities, and honor the eminent composer Gyorgy Kurtag, whose music provided Tolle the inspiration to dedicate himself to the instrument.

Andras Schiff has been closely associated with Lucerne Festival for 35 years. These live recordings from 1998/99, now released for the first time, present him interpreting two masters of the miniature: Schiff performs the short pieces with a love of risk, a great art of characterisation and a tremendous sense of sound.

Joseph Swensen conducts Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with an inner fire that grips all those who have attended one of his concerts; for him it is Beethoven's ultimate achievement, a celebration of humanity -not the romantic hero, but the truly ordinary individual, musically represented by the chorus. Beethoven begins his epic symphony in the darkness of primordial chaos. The first and second movements are visions of the universe before humanity. The third movement is a celestial dream. The beginning of the finale is our awakening. Beethoven wanted Ode to Joy to be a melody that all can sing. This chorus, a realisation in sound of the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment, is neither transcendent, divine, perfect nor impeccable. It is humanity singing of it's joy!

A journey through passion, vision, and sensuality, this album brings together three luminous works for voice and orchestra. At it's heart is Ernest Chausson's Poeme de l'amour et de la mer, Op. 19-a sweeping, late-Romantic meditation on love and loss, where human emotion dissolves into the vastness of the sea. Benjamin Britten's Les illuminations, Op. 18, follows with electric intensity, setting Rimbaud's vivid, surreal poetry in music that is both incisive and radiant. The program closes with Camille Saint-Saens' rare and intimate Extase, a delicate song of rapture and surrender. Tenor Edgaras Montvidas brings refined lyricism and emotional depth to this richly poetic repertoire, joined by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra (for the Chausson), and conductor Modestas Pitrenas. An exploration of love, language, and longing-where music becomes poetry, and poetry sings. Recorded at Lithuanian National Philharmonic Hall June 2021

Star-violinist Christian Tetzlaff, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor John Storgards present in this album two major British violin concertos written between a century, in 1910 and 2005. Elgar's passionate violin concerto, completed in 1910, is a classical-romantic violin concerto in three movements. This huge and highly emotional work was in the wake of modernism neglected for several decades before entering into standard concerto repertoire. Here Christian Tetzlaff follows the model of the early recordings of Elgar's concerto with substantially quicker tempos compared to most modern recordings, and having a great influence on the impact of the piece. Ades' violin concerto 'Concentric Paths', is already a modern classic and no doubt one of the most important concertos written during this century. With it's very demanding violin part the work has all the elements of a true concerto, allowing the soloist to sing with his instrument. The beauty of this music lies that everything is written so clearly.

Sandrine Piau admits that she has always been fascinated not only by Schubert's music but also by the genre of the string quartet. "The endless quest for the pure gesture in which we lose ourselves in order to become one with each other reminds me of the aquatic ballets in old-fashioned musicals, when female swimmers formed images of perfect flowers". Thanks to the Psophos Quartet, her dream has now been realised; together they present a magnificent programme of transcriptions. "Between the hair of the bows and the texture of the voice, our instruments blend and form an imaginary Schubert quintet".

Castor et Pollux is Rameau's third opera and is packed with arias that show off the soloists to their best advantage: Tristes apprêts for Telaire, Nature, Amour for Pollux, Sejour de l'eternelle paix for Castor, and Soulevons tous les dieux for Phebe. In this new recording Judith van Wanroij, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Tassis Christoyannis and Veronique Gens are the outstanding performers, alongside the Purcell Choir and the Orfeo Orchestra conducted by Gyorgy Vashegyi, in a new edition of Rameau's work prepared under the aegis of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles. Research that was begun several years ago on questions of performance practice has now been complemented by their intensive work on the score and the division of roles, respecting what we now know about performance practice at the Paris Opera in Rameau's day.

Edward Gardner's series of Nielsen symphonies with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra continues with this recording of No. 5, complemented with the overture Helios and the Clarinet Concerto, featuring Alessandro Carbonare as soloist. Nielsen composed Helios in 1903 on a trip to Greece, as his wife, Anne Marie, a sculptor, had won a grant to copy sculptures on the Acropolis. Over it's ten-twelve-minute duration, the work depicts sunrise, noontime, and then sunset over the Aegean Sea, and is one of the composer's most performed works. The Clarinet Concerto dates from 1928 and is cast in one long movement falling into four sections. It is dedicated to Nielsen's friend Aage Oxenvad who gave the first performance. Composed between 1920 and 1922, the Fifth Symphony is unusually laid out in just two movements - the only piece by Nielsen to adopt this structure. Unlike his other mature symphonies, the fifth lacks a subtitle, and so could be considered to be more 'pure music' compared to the descriptive nature of the others. Nielsen described the symphony as 'the division of dark and light, the battle between evil and good' and the opposition between 'Dreams and Deeds'. Considered by many as a "war symphony", Nielsen insisted that he had not been thinking of World War I whilst he was composing the work, but also commented "not one of us is the same as we were before the war".

The three works on this recording bear witness to the changes that took place at the dawn of musical modernism. The reappraisal and reinterpretation of traditional musical genres and innovations led to new ways of organising and addressing the harmonic, melodic, timbral and rhythmic elements of music. Polish composer Karol Szymanowski developed a highly personal musical language that prioritises tone colour, an approach that is perfectly suited to the triptych Mythes, inspired by legends from ancient Greece. Here he developed a new mode of expression, a fusion of the violin and the piano into a single entity with the use of extended violin techniques. The Hungarian Bela Bartok assimilated Szymanowski's contribution and composed his two sonatas for violin and piano in quick succession at the beginning of the 1920s. These two works, as daring as they are demanding, skilfully blend the influence of contemporary composers such as Debussy and Schoenberg with elements of Central European folklore. Frank Peter Zimmermann, whose recent recording dedicated to Bartok's two Rhapsodies and Stravinsky's Violin Concerto (BIS-2657) has received international critical acclaim, performs these landmark works with pianist Dmytro Choni, his regular partner since 2023.

Cristian Carrara is one of the most original Italian composers of his generation. The opera Voci da Hebron ('Voices from Hebron') is set during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carrara's expressive depiction of this scenario is one in which fear, anger and incomprehension sit side-by-side with the need for communication, at a time when dialogue is difficult and peace is, at times, a mirage. This land that is home to grief and misunderstanding is also a place in which love can survive and ultimately flourish.

The great Russian conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov was born in Moscow in 1928 and studied with Alexander Gauk at the Moscow Conservatory. From 1955 he conducted at the Bolshoi Theatre, becoming principal conductor (1962-1964). From 1965 he was principal conductor of the USSR State Symphony Orchestra (now the Russian State Symphony Orchestra). In 1979 he was appointed principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Residentie Orchestra (The Hague 1992 - 2000) and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (1997- 1999). He frequently visited the UK, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, USA, and other countries. Svetlanov was a leading interpreter of Russian composers including Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky, Miaskovsky and Scriabin, but also a large number of non-Russian composers ranging from Debussy to Elgar. He died in Moscow aged 73 in 2002.

CORO: inspired by Luciano Berio's 31-song composition of the same name, George de Decker painted a cycle of 31 canvases. The key sentence Berio took as his starting point comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda: 'Venid a ver la sangre por las calles' (Come and see the blood in the streets) - a caustic reference to General Pinochet's seizure of power in Chile in 1973. For the exhibition of this cycle of paintings, de Decker wrote a composition for female voices. On the soundtrack, he incorporated vocal recordings of Els Van Laethem, Anne Marie Honggokoesoemo and Herlinde Ghekiere. At the request of pianist Geert Callaert, he added a piano part, so that CORO ultimately became a composition for solo piano, with a soundtrack with female voices. CORO is preceded by two new scores in the same sound idiom.

Dame Sarah Connolly and Joseph Middleton present a richly rewarding programme of art songs from a variety of composers. The recital opens with Chausson's Poème de l'amour et de la mer, which took almost a decade to compose and shows Wagner's influence on the younger composer. Composed in 1935 on a study trip to Rome, Barber's Three Songs set poems by James Joyce and portray three love affairs. Debussy's Trois Chansons de Bilitis set the erotic poems of Pierre Louÿs, which were all the rage in Paris at the turn of the century. Aaron Copland completed his Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1950, but declared that they should not be seen as a set but as twelve individual works. Connolly here includes 'I've heard an organ talk sometimes' and 'The world feels dusty', the latter giving the album it's title. The programme concludes with the première recording of Errollyn Wallen's Night Thoughts: a cycle of four songs commissioned by Leeds Lieder, and first performed by Dame Sarah and Joseph, the cycle's dedicatees. Setting two of her own poems alongside one by Emily Dickinson and lines from Shakespeare's MacBeth, the cycle took it's inspiration from Howard Hodgkin's painting Night Thoughts.

His 17th album with Signum Classics, the Welsh pianist, Llyr Williams, brings a profound musical intelligence to his work as soloist, accompanist and chamber musician. His second album of Robert Schumann works explores a selection of works that span a substantial part of Schumann's life. Llyr Williams' long and successful collaboration with Signum Records includes the 8-disc box-set 'A Schubert Journey' (2020), the 12-volume 'Beethoven Unbound' (2018), a 'Wagner Without Words' double album (2014) and highlights from Liszt's 'Annees de pelerinage' (2012).

The celebrated Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg is a two-time winner of the 'Best Operatic Recital' Award at the International Opera Awards, while Ian Page's previous Gluck recording with The Mozartists ('Blessed Spirit - a Gluck retrospective') was selected by Gramophone magazine among the top 10 Gluck recordings of all time. Following previous partnerships in the opera house and the concert hall, Hallenberg and Page are now collaborating in the recording studio for the first time on a new recital disc of Gluck arias. The backbone of the programme is provided by three arias from Il trionfo di Clelia (Bologna, 1763) that were written for the renowned castrato Giovanni Manzuoli (1720-1782) - one of the greatest singers of his day - and the album also includes previously unrecorded arias from Ipermestra (Venice, 1744 and Le nozze d'Ercole e d'Ebe (Dresden, 1747). Also featured is Gluck's revised version of the exquisite "Che puro ciel" from Orfeo ed Euridice (written for Parma in 1769), and the popular "O del mio dolce ardor" from the last of the composer's three so-called 'reform' operas, Paride ed Elena. "In an age where so much music of the past is being explored and made available, Gluck nevertheless remains one of the most neglected and undervalued of the great composers, a name that continues to crop up more often in textbooks than in opera houses or concert halls. We very much hope that you will find this music to be of far more than merely historical interest, and that you enjoy listening to this recording." - Ian Page

Francois d'Agincour (1684-1758) was a French composer, organist, and harpsichordist. Though overshadowed by contemporaries such as Francois Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau his surviving keyboard works offer a fascinating glimpse into the refined and ornate French classical organ tradition of the early 18th century. D'Agincour served as organist at the Rouen Cathedral for over 40 years and held royal positions as well, which afforded him access to France's finest instruments and a cultured musical environment. His sole surviving organ collection, Premier livre d'orgue (1733), contains a series of pieces organized into suites according to church modes, consistent with the liturgical practices of the time. Each suite contains various movements - including Plein jeux, Fugues, Recits, and Dialogues - that correspond to specific parts of the Catholic mass. His music reflects the elegance and clarity characteristic of the French classical organ school, with it's emphasis on ornamentation, color, and registration. D'Agincour skillfully exploits the tonal possibilities of the French classical organ, composing pieces that call for distinctive solo stops such as the Cromorne, Tierce, and Cornet. While structurally conservative, his music reveals a personal voice marked by harmonic finesse, rhythmic vitality, and melodic inventiveness. Though his output is modest compared to others, d'Agincour's organ works exemplify the culmination of the French classical style just before it began to yield to the more galant and Classical idioms. Modern interest in historical performance practices has led to a renewed appreciation of his music. Recorded by Chikako Nishikawa at the Andrea Zeni tribune organ in the Chiesa Parrocchiale dei SS. Giuseppe e Lucia, Italy After her studies in her Native Japan Chikako Nishikawa went to Europe to study in Zurich, Fribourg and The Hague, meanwhile receiving top prizes at international competitions. Lately she studied organ, with a focus on early music, with Federico Del Sordo at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome (Post-Gradum course).

GRAMMY-nominated drummer Nate Smith, known for his deep groove and genre-blending style, has worked with legends like Pat Metheny and Jose James, and wowed millions with his viral drum videos. Following acclaimed projects like KINFOLK: Postcards from Everywhere and Pocket Change, Smith returns with a new album, out August 29, continuing his journey through jazz, R&B, and beyond. Some of the most renowned names in the jazz scene have joined him on the project, including Lalah Hathaway, Michael League, Lionel Loueke, and more.

Maria de Buenos Aires is a tango operita (little opera) composed by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) with a libretto by poet Horacio Ferrer. Premiering in 1968, the piece is one of Piazzolla's most ambitious and innovative works, blending tango, classical music, and surrealist poetry. It represents a major departure from traditional tango, showcasing Piazzolla's distinctive nuevo tango style-complex, dramatic, and infused with elements of jazz and avant-garde music. -The operita tells the symbolic and enigmatic story of Maria, a woman born "one day when God was drunk" in the slums of Buenos Aires. She becomes a tango singer and a symbol of sensuality and suffering. After her death, Maria's shadow wanders through the underworld of the city, encountering surreal characters such as the Duende (a goblin-like narrator) and a chorus of psychoanalysts, construction workers, and thieves. The narrative is abstract, filled with metaphors and mystical elements, portraying Maria both as a real woman and an allegory for Buenos Aires itself, particularly it's tango culture. Musically, Maria de Buenos Aires is richly textured, featuring bandoneon (a type of concertina essential in tango music), piano, violin, and voice. Piazzolla's score breaks traditional tango rhythms and harmonies, pushing the genre into new emotional and intellectual territory. The work is often interpreted as a meditation on identity, femininity, urban life, and rebirth. Despite it's initial mixed reception, it has gained recognition as a groundbreaking piece in 20th-century music and a key work in Piazzolla's oeuvre. Maria de Buenos Aires remains a vivid, haunting exploration of the soul of Buenos Aires, where tango is not just a dance or music form, but a poetic expression of passion, loss, and resilience. Performed by Ce Suarez Paz (soprano Maria), Cesare Chiacchiaretta (bandoneon), soloists and the Orchestra Filarmonica della Calabria, conducted by Filippo Arlia.