Lux Stellarum (Light of the Stars) is a short requiem for choir and organ, written for Zach Ullery, Andrew Dewar, and the choir of the American Cathedral, Paris. Along with texts by Marjorie Pickthall and John Donne, Lux Stellarum interpolates a number of biblical passages about stars and the universe.

While Pygmalion, Rameau's emblematic work, reveals the passion of a sculptor in love with his creation, Pierre Iso's Zemide reveals the gentle tyranny of Love, weaving an allegory in which even the fiercest hearts yield to it's power. Like Galatea awakening under Pygmalion's gaze, this vibrant programme of Baroque passion comes to life under the inspired direction of Reinoud Van Mechelen, offering a spectacle where music and sentiment intertwine in dazzling symphonies.

Cohaere Ensemble brings back to life the instrumental works of an unfairly forgotten composer. The music of Pierre Gaultier de Marseille has accompanied the ensemble since it's earliest days. The precise, luminous performance of the Symphonies divisees par suites de tons, in the 1707 edition, gives this rare work a fresh and modern feel.

This album presents two exceptional chamber works by French composer George Onslow (1784-1853): the String Quintets Op. 72 in G minor and Op. 61 in F minor. Though celebrated in his time and often called the "French Beethoven," Onslow's music fell into obscurity until recent decades. These quintets, from the height of his career, reveal his gift for melodic invention, structural clarity, and expressive depth. The Op. 61 Quintet appears here in it's world premiere recording, following Ensemble Tamuz's discovery of the original manuscript in a private collection linked to the 19th-century cellist Adrien-Francois Servais. Ensemble Tamuz performs on period instruments and brings a historically informed yet vividly expressive approach to Onslow's music. With insight drawn from 19th-century performance practices, they illuminate the subtle freedoms ornamentation, rubato, melodic nuance that bring Romantic chamber music to life. This recording offers a fresh and compelling encounter with two masterful yet underappreciated works of the Romantic repertoire.

Here We Are finds acclaimed jazz vocalist Lori Williams at the heart of a soulful, cross-continental collaboration with top-tier European jazz artists. Born out of friendships from the Poysdorf Summer Jazz Workshop, the album blends original songs and timeless standards with Brazilian grooves, romantic ballads, and classic swing. Williams' warm, expressive voice shines across each track whether delivering heartfelt lyrics or improvising with grace and nuance. Backed by a band that listens and responds as one, Here We Are is a celebration of connection, creativity, and the joy of making music together.

For her first project at Cypres, young Belgian pianist Cassandre Marfin thinks big and has come up with Jusqu'a la nuit, a triptych devoted to chromesthesia, one of the many forms of synesthesia known to date. Synesthesia refers to the general alliance of two senses within the brain of an individual. Chromesthesia, on the other hand, refers specifically to the association between colours and sounds. Each volume of this trilogy is dedicated to a primary colour: blue, yellow and red. This first volume focuses on blue, which is undoubtedly the colour most present in music and the one most appreciated in the Western world. According to Cassandre Marfin, it evokes the world of night and dreams, something intangible and indefinite. It is a source of multiple representations in our imaginations. Through a skilfully conceived programme, the pianist associates this colour with ideas, metaphors and compositional systems that allow us to form our own personal impression of blue.

Luminous, sublime, joyful. The soundscapes and emotions captured in the latest disc from Somerville College Choir abound with light. In this curated selection of music from the Indian subcontinent, you will find a vibrant expression of what might be called the living Indian Choral tradition. As plural and changing as light within a prism, the album moves from the fluid harmonies of a Konkani wedding song to deep somatic meditations inspired by the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, from Hindi secular poetry associated with the changing seasons to a whole-choir explosion of joyful rhythmic syllables in Reena Esmail's virtuosic raga exposition. In this humble tribute to the monumental tapestry of Indian classical music, the Somerville College Choir gives the oldest expression yet of it's aspiration to embrace musical styles far beyond the liturgical canon.

When was the last time you were really furious? With baroque orchestra La Sfera Armoniosa led by Mike Fentross, soprano Channa Malkin explores the raw power of anger through the intense and heart-wrenching music of Antonio Vivaldi. From hidden operatic gems to the fierce�In furore iustissimae irae, this album channels rage into beauty. Inspired by Channa's journey as a woman and mother, it reveals how moving through intense emotion can open the door to compassion, clarity, and catharsis.

Led by it's Director Matthew Martin, The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, joins forces with the Academy of Ancient Music in Michael Haydn's rarely heard masterpieces: the Requiem and Missa Sancti Hieronymi. The four soloists are all ex-choral scholars of Caius Choir, showcasing the distinguished musical tradition of this student group. Unjustly neglected, Joseph Haydn's younger brother was a talented composer in his own right. Written after the death of his infant daughter and his patron, the deeply emotional Requiem is a masterpiece that combines complex colourful textures and forms with imaginative orchestration and vocal writing. Mozart was a great admirer and it is thought that Haydn's Requiem formed the prototype for his own better known masterpiece. In contrast, the later Missa Sancti Hieronymi is lighter and more optimistic. Unusually scored for oboes, bassoons, trombones and continuo (with no upper strings), it exudes transparency and joyful energy. This recording will undoubtedly put these neglected works back into mainstream repertoire.

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.

A striking portrait of Rebecca Clarke through the prism of her chamber music, covering the powerful Viola Sonata as well as a diverse sequence of miniatures and tone-pictures. After decades of neglect, the music of Rebecca Clarke is now receiving it's due attention, revealing her individuality as one of the most distinctive of English composers in the generation after Elgar. In her booklet essay, the pianist Margherita Santi recalls her introduction to Clarke and how it immediately sparked 'deep admiration and wonder': she finds the roots of Clarke's style in the music of Franck and Ravel but also the German tradition, paying tribute to the composer's uncompromisingly individual language. The Viola Sonata is one of Clarke's major works, which she wrote in 1918-19 while on tour between Honolulu and Detroit, and for herself to perform. The Sonata has since entered the repertoire of solo violists with an ardent vein of expression and gritty harmony, balancing pastoralism with an unsentimental toughness which makes it's occasional windows of visionary mysticism all the more effective. As Margherita Santi remarks, the Sonata evokes 'a melancholic sensitivity: the gaze of someone who, observing the world, perceives and understands what is unseen, yet chooses not to intervene.' The other works here are hardly less substantial, despite their smaller scale. Named after the Greek god of sleep, Morpheus (1917) inhabits a world of heavy-lidded r�verie which decorates the viola line with Szymanowskian tracery from the piano. A pair of Lullabies, harmonically simpler, are no less effective and even lovelier; a pair of folk-song settings, one Scottish, the other English, are moving in their simple restraint. Likewise based on an English folk tune, the Passacaglia returns to the shadowy and stormy world of the Viola Sonata. Midsummer Moon (for violin and piano) is perhaps the closest Clarke came to writing in a popular salon style. Finally, the trio of instruments joins forces in a nostalgic Dumka: a masterful fusion of Czech dance style with Clarke's own, more forward-looking perspective. This studio recording, made in Milan in 2024, makes an ideal introduction to the world of Rebecca Clarke, presenting her in the round, through cultivated performances by musicians who feel an affinity for the composer's trail-blazing and fearless spirit.

This compelling debut album from composer Lucy Walker showcases one of the UK's most exciting emerging voices in choral composition. Written during her residency with St Martin's Voices, the works trace a journey of artistic growth and spiritual depth, from the hopeful intimacy of Today to the shimmering expansiveness of I saw eternity. Walker's music is deeply rooted in the choral tradition, yet distinctly contemporary her harmonic language radiant and text-driven, her textures luminous and finely woven. Under the sensitive direction of Andrew Earis, St Martin's Voices bring remarkable nuance and warmth to these performances, revealing the emotional resonance and craftsmanship in each piece. Whether drawing on plainsong, part-song or contrapuntal dance, Walker's voice is unmistakably her own lyrical, thoughtful, and full of light. This album is both a celebration of collaboration and a moving portrait of a composer whose music speaks with clarity, heart and vision.

World-premiere recordings of six attractive concertos by a Neapolitan flautist-composer celebrated in 18th-century Dublin and London. Tommaso Giordani (1730-1806) arrived on the northern shore of the English Channel in 1753, as one of the youngest members of a conspicuously talented musical family, and found good reason never to return southwards. In Dublin he gave lessons to the boy John Field, who would later much surpass the fame of his teacher by creating the genre of the piano nocturne. Meanwhile Giordani had returned to the English capital, where he wrote most of his surviving compositions - such as this set of flute concertos, dating from 1775-9 and dedicated to a flute-playing baronet. Each concerto follows a familiar formal pattern: a sonata-form first movement, an introspective second, often rising to a considerable peak of intensity, and a sparkling rondo-finale. Within this pattern, Giordani finds space for continual variety: the form does not constrain his invention but (in classic Baroque practice) rather supplies an elegant vessel for it. As much as the good baronet, he was clearly writing with himself in mind as a soloist, and this is music written for display and delight, and played here in that spirit by a period-instrument ensemble of musicians based in Turin, led by the Italian flautist Giovanni Miszczyszyn. The recording was made in 2024 at the Chiesa della Santa Spirito in Turin where the musicians give a regular concert series. It is infused with not only a spirit of Giordani's age but with a chamber-music sense of collaborative enterprise.

Internationally celebrated as both a soloist and conductor, Florian Krumpock has more than proven his outstanding capability in the international concert scene. "Forget Lang Lang and Arcadi Volodos. There are highly virtuoso keyboard tigers in Austria too", was the verdict of the daily newspaper "Die Presse" on the pianist's solo debut at the Vienna Konzerthaus. On this album, Florian Krumpock presents two of Robert Schumann's seminal works Fantasiestucke, Op. 12 and Symphonic etudes, Op. 13 both deeply intertwined with his great love and future wife, Clara Wieck. The album's title, "Between Eusebius and Florestan", alludes to the alter egos Schumann frequently invoked during this period: opposing personas that profoundly influenced his work as both a music critic and a composer. This recording of the Symphonic etudes includes five posthumously published variations, with the finale drawn from Schumann's 1852 revised version.

The final volume in a new groundbreaking and much-praised complete symphony cycle of Ferdinand Ries' (1784-1838) symphonies by the Tapiola Sinfonietta and conductor Janne Nisonen includes the composer's two final statements in the symphony genre. Like most of his symphonies, also Ries' Symphony No. 6 was premiered in London in 1822. His 7th Symphony, written a decade later, remained in the shadows and was published only in 2004. Both works, however, are full of discoveries.