Alfred Hill was the doyen of Australasian composers, and his exploration of the string quartet demonstrates the range of his imagination. Both the Tenth and Eleventh quartets were written in 1935, but they offer richly differing affiliations.

Choral music from one of Britain's leading composers. These wide-ranging and deeply communicative settings present a rich variety of vocal colours and textures. Includes several world premi�re recordings.

Volume 8 features two compositions from Busoni's teenage years (1881-83). Charming and engaging works which already reveal an inventive and personal accommodation wth mid-19th century Romanticism.

Wallace was, from his youth, steeped in Irish and Scottish traditional music. In 1848, five years after his brilliant successes in New York as a virtuoso pianist, he published his first set of arrangements.

Boris Tchaikovsky is revered in Russian musical circles as one of the most original and innovative composers of the post-Shostakovich generation. A work of great depth and beauty, the Piano Quintet is considered his finest chamber work and a stylistic milestone which would influence aspects of the later Piano Concerto (8.557727). Based on a the score for the 1964 film While the Front is in Defence, The War Suite is an evocative portrayal of the horrors of battle, but also of heroism, friendship and lost love, at the Volkhov Front, south east of Leningrad, during the winter of 1942.

Psalms have long played a central part in Christian worship, assuming even greater importance in England following the Protestant Reformation.

• Composer Jan Van der Roost's Sinfonia Hungarica (2001) uses key figures and historical moments in pre-Hungarian history to tell its story. From Ancient Times is an homage to the Renaissance era Franco-Flemish School of music paid via use of 'modernized' older compositional techniques. • Mr. Van der Roost leads the Philharmonic Winds OSAKAN in this recording. • The Philharmonic Winds OSAKAN pursues new possibilities in wind music. Mr. Van der Roost is its Principal Guest Conductor.

While the unifying thread which links these works is that of loss, the underlying focus is an uplifting celebration of life and love. Gabriel Jackson's Requiem combines traditional solemnity with poems which embrace wide-ranging spirituality, resulting in images of light and radiant optimism. Contrasting poignancy of expression is heard in personal tributes from John Tavener and Francis Pott, while Bob Chilcott uses Pachelbel's famous Canon to set Oscar Wilde's Requiescat. Vasari Singers' Great British Anthems (8.572504) was described as 'essential listening' by Gramophone. Founded in 1980, Vasari Singers is among the leading chamber choirs in Britain, performing music ranging from Renaissance to contemporary. The choir performs regularly in London as well as visiting many of England's cathedrals to sing services, with recent trips to Canterbury, Salisbury, Bath and Ripon. The choir and Jeremy Backhouse are deeply committed to contemporary music and have commissioned over twenty works since 2000, including works by Francis Pott and Gabriel Jackson.

Completed in 1936, two years after the hugely popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony was considered by the composer to be one of his finest works. Both this and the Symphonic Dances, his last work, offer a summation of his late style in blending intense rhythmic energy with rich romanticism. Leonard Slatkin and the DSO’s recording of the Second Symphony (8.572458) was hailed by BBC Music Magazine as “a performance warmed by musicians who clearly love this symphony”.

A unique programme of music by Alexander Goehr unavailable elsewhere on record. The composer's close association with conductor Oliver Knussen and pianist Peter Serkin give all of these performances definitive status.

A strong opponent of oppression in all it's forms, Leonardo Balada met Martin Luther King in 1967. His Sinfonia en Negro is a powerful response to King's subsequent murder as well as a description of the black people's journey in the Americas from slavery to freedom. Both the Sinfonia and the virtuoso Double Concerto use Balada's pioneering blend of ethnic music with avant-garde techniques, while Columbus: Images for Orchestra is a free adaptation of four contrasting scenes from his acclaimed opera Christopher Columbus (8.660237-38). in 2007 Leonardo Balada won an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters that helped make this recording possible.

Thierry Lancino’s background includes extensive periods of research at IRCAM and elsewhere,but his recent work concentrates on a lyrical and bold freedom of style embracing ideas of bothseduction and spirituality. Inspired by a scene of historical impact, his Prelude and Death ofVirgil dramatizes the demise of a daunting genius. Lancino writes of his Violin Concerto that hisimagination was fired by ‘the thought of a little piece of wood (in reality a 1704 Stradivarius),played by Isabelle Faust, confronting a gigantic machine (the full orchestra)’. Thierry Lancino’sRequiem (Naxos 8.572771) was described as ‘exhilarating’ by BBC Music Magazine.

DOWLAND: Songs of Tears, Dreams and Spirits

Prokofiev's imposing Fourth Symphony and his final ballet for Sergey Dyagilev, the Prodigal Son, share common roots but are entirely distinctive in character. The vivid depictions in the ballet's moral tale include sensual temptations, drunken debauchery, robbery and remorse. The 1947 revision of the Fourth Symphony, lengthened and enriched in orchestration by the addition of a piccolo clarinet, piano and harp, makes extended use of themes from the Prodigal Son as well as unused material. Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony with Marin Alsop and the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra (8.573029) was described as 'an outstanding achievement' by BBC Music Magazine.

A child prodigy as a violin virtuoso, Ferdinand David became concertmaster of Felix Mendelssohn’s Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and was renowned throughout Europe as a soloist and educator. +David’s 20 Virtuoso Studies, based on those for piano by his friend, and colleague Ignaz Moscheles, are brilliant and completely idiomatic transcriptions for the violin. +Melodies of great emotional depth and refined sensuality characterize the Caprices Op. 9, often demanding lightning speed from the soloist.