For the 13th volume in the 'Next Generation Mozart Soloists' series, Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, who has already released a highly acclaimed debut album (Alpha 930), has agreed to tackle the early piano concertos of the very young Mozart: "these works already reveal his brilliance in melody, elegance and charm. Paradoxically, the main difficulty for the performer lies in the transparency of these works: every single note is exposed, which requires absolute clarity and precision". Another interesting feature of this recording is the concertante repertoire for several solo instruments, specifically the Concertone in C major for two violins and orchestra from 1774, performed here by violinists (and sisters) Veriko and Sofiko Tchumburidze, who emphasise the work's chamber music character. Pascal Deuber (the new principal horn of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich) highlights the unceasing lyricism and fluidity of Mozart's third horn concerto, the opening work in this new journey of discovery, conducted by Howard Griffiths.

Her fifth recital album on Signum Records, celebrated soprano Mary Bevan returns with a selection of French songs, featuring works by composers including Britten, Ravel, Debussy and Faure.

Concertos for bass clarinet are rare enough; this album brings three new ones to swell those limited ranks. It presents the fruit of a series of interlocking international co-operations, between orchestras in Sweden, the UK and USA, with American, British and Swedish composers and, at the heart of the undertaking, the bass clarinettist of the Malmo Symphony Orchestra, Carl-Johan Stjernstrom. All three composers exploit the huge range of colours the bass clarinet can offer, in music that ranges from the fierce and dramatic to the sunny and easy-going. The album also inaugurates a Toccata Next series providing a platform for the musicians of the Malmo Symphony Orchestra.

Henriette Bosmans' mother was a pianist and her father played principal cello in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra, so it is no wonder that both of these instruments were lasting influences on her musical thinking and sensibilities. Her friendship with cellists Marix Loevensohn and Frieda Belinfante did the rest to guide this Dutch composer's imagination towards the expressive possibilities of the "little violone". In addition to various pieces of chamber music, the somewhat Iberian-spiced Poeme as well as two concertos were written in the early 1920s. Despite their relative proximity in time, Henriette Bosmans succeeded in not repeating herself. The works are marked by imaginative forms, wildly varied tasks demanded of the soloist and a sophisticated treatment of the orchestra. Despite these works' success, they had disappeared into the annals of history for far too long.

This CD is the result of the 12th International Competition "Franz Schubert and Modern Music" (FS & MM), which took place in February 2025 and was organised by the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. The Trio Bronte won 1st prize in the piano trio category with the repertoire on the recording. The Trio was founded in Berlin in 2022 and consists of German-Italian violinist Chiara Sannicandro, Bulgarian pianist Lili Bogdanova, and American cellist Annie Jacobs-Perkins. After playing together for only a few months, the Trio Bronte won 1st prize at the 2023 Ilmari Hannikainen International Piano Chamber Music Competition in Finland. The trio grew up surrounded by the passionate and turbulent novels of the Bronte sisters and named themselves after them, inspired by their passion for storytelling, their intelligence and their sociability.

Nelson Goerner has always dreamed of recording these two masterpieces of the concerto repertoire. With Kazuki Yamada, he has found the ideal partner to approach Ravel's two piano concertos with the sensitivity and poetry for which he is universally renowned. The two works, composed at the same time and both performed for the first time in 1932, are nevertheless very different: premiered in Vienna, the Concerto for the Left Hand was commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in 1914; premiered in Paris, the Concerto in G is renowned for it's verve and it's famous pianistic interpolations. Ravel had composed the Pavane pour une infante defunte, a famous miniature of exquisite nostalgia, some 33 years earlier. The programme is completed by the Valses nobles et sentimentales; Marguerite Long, who gave the first performance of the Concerto in G, saw these eight linked pieces as a "stylistic panorama of the waltz".

The piano dances: new recordings of ballet classics in sparkling keyboard arrangements. Born in Russia, living and working in Germany, Ekaterina Litvintseva has made a string of critically acclaimed recordings for Piano Classics, featuring the music of Chopin, Rachmaninoff and more. On her latest album, she turns to a trio of ballet scores which have always captivated audiences for the particular genius of their marriage between story and music. She opens with Prokofiev's own arrangement of 10 pieces from Romeo and Juliet, followed by Guido Agosti's arrangement of the Suite from Stravinsky's Firebird, and Mikhail Pletnev's virtuoso transcription of dances from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. As in any popular recital, there are three encores: a waltz from Delibes' Coppelia (arranged by Erno Dohnanyi), Les Sauvages by Rameau, and finally another foot-tapping dance from the French Baroque, extracted from an opera by Lully. In these transcriptions, the pianist becomes more than just a substitute for the orchestra; she takes the role of a storyteller and a conduit for the expression of the ballet. The reduction of forces brings a more intense focus on the melodic lines, the harmonic progressions and the rhythmic subtleties of the music. Prokofiev chose to recompose and distil the essence of pivotal moments in Romeo and Juliet rather than making straightforward arrangements. In their own ways, Agosti and Pletnev also demonstrate that the essence of ballet can be captured and reimagined in the hands of a skilled pianist. While their versions of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky have become crowd-pleasing pianistic tours de force in their own right, they also retain the elegance and the fundamental pulse of the original dances. 'The 30-something Ekaterina Litvintseva has been amassing a distinguished discography, and this... is a fine addition, exhibiting the combination of sensitivity and self-assurance that have marked her playing up until now... you owe it to yourself to make the acquaintance of Dora Pejacevic.' (Fanfare, reviewing PCL10226)

Joachim Raff was a largely self-taught composer whose style stands somewhere between the German traditionalism of Schumann and the newer school of Wagner. Raff composed seven Suites for Piano, a form he preferred to the sonata, and this provided him with greater freedom as a composer, resulting in his most substantial contribution to the piano literature. This is reflected in the Mendelssohn-like lyricism of the First Suite; contrasts between Baroque and Romantic styles in the Third Suite, a piece admired by Liszt; and more nationalist inclinations in the memorably melodic Fifth Suite.

Luigi Boccherini composed just a single set of sonatas, Op.5, specifically for violin and piano. However, his commercial celebrity and his artistic reputation at the time, as a composer considered in the same breath as Mozart and Haydn, encouraged publishers to commission arrangements of other works. Such arrangements include this set of Sonatas published in London in 1780, made by Thomas Billington but admitted to the catalogue of Boccherini's works as G34-39. Igor Ruhadze and Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya have made the first ever complete recording of this set as a sequel to their 5CD set of Boccherini sonatas (96612) issued by Brilliant Classics in 2023. 'Looking forward to the sequel!' concluded the review in Diapason of that set, after praising the stylish spirit of musicianship and authenticity in the playing of both artists. Compared to their rivals on record, remarked the reviewer, 'the seduction is more demonstrative, the contrasts more accentuated, the sensuality and the feeling more showy.' Today, as Rudolf Rasch's booklet note remarks, we may prefer original works over arranged works; in the 18th century, such a preference was unknown. No one looked down on them. In fact, they made a composer's music accessible for those who could not perform them in their original format. There was hardly a format more accessible for music-making among friends than the violin sonata, in which the piano would take the lion's share of the harmony from the original work, with the principal melody line assigned to the violin. As well as these violin sonatas, Thomas Billington arranged Corelli's concerti grossi for solo keyboard, and composed a good deal of his own music. In these sonatas, he drew from Boccherini's Trios Op.4 and Op.6, Quartets Op.8 and Quintets Op.10. He was in any case emulating the example of Boccherini himself, who made several such arrangements. As always with Boccherini, there is no shortage of attractive melodies and upbeat, galant invention to contrast with the lyrical beauty of the slow movements. - Luigi Boccherini was born in the Italian city of Lucca in Tuscany, on 19 February 1743, the son of Leopoldo Boccherini, a cellist and double-bass player. The young Luigi received his first music lessons from his father and at the Seminario di San Giovanni in Lucca. The cello was to become his instrument. At the age of ten, he was apparently already so advanced that his father sent him to Rome for further studies at the end of 1753, where he possibly remained until 1756. Apart from a brief period in Vienna around 1760, he was in Lucca until he set out to Paris (perhaps the major musical centre of the time) in the spring of 1768. Later that year he would go to Spain, where he would remain for the rest of his life until his death on 28 May 1805. - This new recording is the second volume of the complete violin sonatas, works in which the pianoforte plays a significant role next to the solo violin. - Critical praise for violinist Igor Ruhadze and pianist Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya: 'The early-music world needs more performers like Igor Ruhadze... This is some of the most accomplished historically informed violin playing I have heard in a long time.' Fanfare (Geminiani, 96524). 'Nepomnyashchaya provides a lesson in how one may realize such sonata bass lines. Her accompaniment is varied in texture and detail, balancing right-hand countermelodies with arpeggiated chordal washes of sound and heavy block chords at cadences. Like Ruhadze, she is a consummate specialist in Baroque style and practice.' - 'These musicians make a strong case for the violin-keyboard duo as an artistic medium. 'Strongly recommended for the music itself and for the dedicated, exciting performances.' Fanfare (Locatelli, 94376).

While cpo is currently preparing a box set with all of Austrian composer Egon Wellesz' nine symphonies, the Aron Quartet has begun recording a cycle of his string quartets. This contemporary of Alban Berg and private pupil of Arnold Schoenberg had a remarkable life and career, both in that genre as well as in orchestral music. His career began at the end of the post-Romantic period, whose signs of harmonic dissolution could no longer be overheard, but whose Romanticism was expounded upon in all of it's autumnal charm. Later, we witness a constructive reorientation that reveals the strict architectural underpinnings of chamber music without compromise. The interplay, migrations and transformations of motifs, the shifting force fields between the individual voices, the dynamic urge to break new ground - all invite the listener to participate with intensity and fascination.

A Due Liuti (Thierry Meunier and Jean-Marie Poirier) offer a selection of pieces from the Elizabethan period and beyond. A good number of theses duets are unpublished and recorded here for the first time.

The music on this album reflects upon and responds to the state of the world it's wars, polarization, and climate change. It fills me with melancholy and sorrow, yet within this darkness, I also see hope through the people I encounter in my life and the power of the positive initiatives that still take place. Hope grows in intimate conversations, in the creative space of music where we intuitively understand each other through listening, in children's play, and in resistance against narrow-mindedness. In the resilience of nature, society, and people during this uncertain time of change. Photographer Anders Petersen has generously allowed me to use his image Hamburg as the album cover. To me, the image speaks of an unfathomable moment of mutual connection of resonance in the midst of everyday life. And perhaps hope lies precisely there, in our wonder and resonance with the world around us. Three compositions Ruins, Evening Hymn, and With Hope draw inspiration from traditional hymns of Gammelsvenskby in Ukraine. Parts of the theme in Arctic Call are based on phrases from an Inuit drum song from Greenland, and the original idea for Woods in Blue comes from a polska from Harjedalen, Sweden. The closing piece, O Magnum Mysterium by Francis Poulenc, was originally written for soprano solo and choir.

The Concerto Koln goes on a journey of discovery and contrasts the famous Johann Sebastian Bach with the now unknown Johann Adolf Scheibe?. The ensemble is accompanied by the excellent soprano Marie Sophie Pollak. Together they present the two rivaling composers in a way, where instrumental and vocal composition by Bach and Scheibe alternate on the album?.

Following his first album of French lute music, Alban Tixier invites us to join him as he explores the byways of European music dating from the 13th to the 15th century.

Conductor and composer Jorg Widmann leads the Stuttgarter Kammerochester in this album of masterpieces for string orchestra. The precocious Mendelssohn is represented with his String Symphony No.10 in B minor. It consists of a single movement, in which a sweeping slow introduction is followed by an allegro and coda. Widmann's own Ikarische Klage takes it's subject matter from a poem by Baudelaire: "Burnt by the love of beauty / I will not have the sublime honour / of giving my name to the abyss / that will serve as my grave". On Korngold's Symphonic Serenade, Widmann says "What a piece, full of glittering magic!". In this work we hear dreams of a real or imaginary Vienna in the time of Mahler or Berg: a vision that looks to the future, is heart-rending but never sentimental.

This album presents sounds from Japan with piano and marimba and invites to a musical journey full of nostalgia and cultural depths. It reveals the beautry of traditional Japanese melodies in a modern, emotional guise with virtouso interpretations by Benyamin Nuss and Fumito Nunoya.

This Ondine debut album by the award-winning Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Justina Gringyte, one of the foremost rising stars of the opera world, and pianist Malcolm Martineau is her first solo album and the complete recording of Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) long-forgotten masterpiece, Vingt Melodies (20 Songs), Op. 21. Year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Bizet, one of the greatest French composers of all time. During his short career of little more than twenty years Bizet composed a substantial quantity of music, including 15 operas. Bizet has been compared with Mozart in his sensitivity to the human voice and understanding of it's expressive potential. Several of Bizet's operas predate his twenty songs Opus 21, written between 1854 and 1872. Anyone new to these songs, a collection including many masterpieces, may wonder how music of such consistent quality could be so neglected! Clearly, they must be ranked among Bizet's most representative works.

Masako Ohta chooses a haiku by Matsuo Basho as the motto for her musical garden: For a while moonlit night over flowers. Ohta opens with "In a landscape" by John Cage and leads over to "Clair de lune" by Claude Debussy with the Intermezzo, Nº 2, A major by Johannes Brahms. Pattern B "Yabe" from Patterns of Plants by Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda is just as much a part of her journey into the infinite nature of sounds as Fumio Yasuda's "Rain Forrest" and "Souvenir from Japan, Sakura for Piano" by Toshio Hosokawa. Masako Ohta combines classical music from Schubert, Mozart, Chopin and Zimmermann with contemporary Japanese sounds to create a poetic work of fine and sensitive timbres. With "My Music Garten", Masako Ohta releases her third piano solo album on Winter & Winter. For the recordings, Ohta retreated to a solitary forest house in the Bavarian Forest, far away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, to be inspired by silence and nature. This album is the result of her intensive study of poetry, sound and music from her native Japan and her adopted home in the West. Masako Ohta lives in Munich and performs all over the world, often in collaboration with actors, dancers, poets and visual artists.

Jose Elizondo is a multifaceted Mexican composer. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at Harvard University. In the field of technology, Jose works full-time as an engineer in a company that specializes in speech recognition technology systems. As a composer, Jose writes chamber and orchestral music in a style that is lyrical and expressive, often drawing inspiration from Latin American folk music.

Garreth Broke is a pianist, composer, writer, teacher and grief companion based in Frankfurt, Germany?. His music cuts through the noise of overwrought emotions and cheap platitudes. Garreth Broke's musical style blends elements of early Romanticism and contemporary minimalist piano music. His compositions are characterized by emotive melodies and intricate harmonies.

Delos is thrilled to welcome Avery Fisher Career Grant-winning violinist and composer Tim Fain. A unique voice on the music scene, Tim is at the forefront of technology, and has produced boundary-pushing projects in collaboration with Google, Samsung, Facebook, BBC, and TEDx, among many others. He can also be heard on the soundtracks to many acclaimed films, including Black Swan, 12 Years a Slave, and Don't Look Up. His first album for Delos, Unraveling, was born from a time of profound uncertainty. Conceived against a backdrop of pandemic, political upheaval, climate crisis, and rising mental health struggles among the youth population, this collection of works is not a surrender to despair, but a search for meaning, resilience, and hope. Featuring powerful works by John Corigliano, Bryce Dessner, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk - alongside Tim's own deeply personal composition, Unraveling - this album is a journey through disintegration and renewal.

Passing Fancy: Beauty in a Moment of Chaos, the AVIE debut by leading New York City early music ensemble Sonnambula, traverses music by several Renaissance composers who were forced to conceal their identities for social, religious or ethnic reasons. Yet their music transcended the disorder surrounding them, flourishing in the intersection of beliefs and styles. Disruption and displacement wasn't uncommon in 16th-and 17th-centuries Europe. During the Reformation, creative individuals, including composers, were often forced to conceal their identities - for reasons social, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise. Yet despite - or perhaps due to - the disorder, musical styles and forms flourished, earning the era it's Renaissance designation and thus creating "Beauty in a Moment of Chaos". Sonnambula, an ensemble of New York City-based early music luminaries, bestow beauty on their AVIE debut, traversing an aural intersection of beliefs with northern and southern European styles. Here is the beauty of William Byrd and Richard Dering, two Catholics composing in Protestant England; of Leonora Duarte, a Portuguese-Jewish woman forced to live as a converso ("New Christian"), in Antwerp, and Parisian Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, whose lost works have re-emerged with a vengeance in our own time; of the Bolognese Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder who emigrated to England, and Salomone Rossi who unusually set Hebrew texts to Western-style polyphony from his relatively tolerant position in the court of Mantua. The release of Passing Fancy: Beauty in a Moment of Chaos coincides with Sonnambula's taking up residency at New York City's newly-renovated premiere museum, The Frick Collection.

Women were not always allowed to compose - often due to restrictions imposed by their families or for social reasons. Ursula Erhart-Schwertmann, cello, and Elisabeth Aigner-Monarth, piano, illustrate on this album by the title "lost & found" the compositional activity of women in that era, in which composing for women was increasingly recognized. Their lists of works contain mainly short chamber music pieces, less often large-scale orchestral works. This selection of works also takes this into account and offers a compilation of character pieces from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Female composers from France, Great Britain, Denmark and north-eastern Europe like Mel Bonis, Amy Beach, Ethel Barns, Hilda Sehested or Marie Clemence de Grandval, among others, are given a voice and document the musical range of this genre.

A new album on GENUIN from the internationally performing pianist Sophia Weidemann! A prizewinner at numerous international competitions, she thrilled both critics and audiences with her album of works by Fanny Hensel. Now she follows up with a recording devoted to Bach: the program features the world-famous Goldberg Variations, which show off the phrasing and tonal artistry of this young pianist from Swabia to brilliant effect. She takes her listeners on an exciting and moving journey through the 30 variations - a work in which, for Bach, an entire world is contained. To quote the composer himself: "A most joyful delight for the soul!"

Red is the color of love and of roses, but also of blood, anger, and shame. Soprano Eva Resch delves into the multifaceted meanings of this color in her new concept album for GENUIN. Together with her piano partner Eric Schneider, she interprets songs spanning from the Classical era to the present - from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Wolfgang Rihm. With her versatile voice, she traces the subtlest shades of human emotion and creates expressive character portraits that range from jubilant ecstasy to the depths of sorrow.