The Elastic Heart of Youth Preface - Notes of Renewal If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying it's manifold apparent dissonances. - Jean Sibelius, In 1907, in conversation with Gustav Mahler. Originating in distinct musical dialects - Baroque, Classical, Nordic, Slavic, French, and contemporary - the works recorded here are bound together by a vivid, elastic heart: a profound spirit of vitality that endures through tension and release, stillness and motion, loss and restoration. Beneath their differing voices beats a kindred pulse shared with the natural world. Sibelius's Le Sapin evokes the spruce's calm and poise, it's hushed sonorities suggesting their own logic of repose. Janacek's Sonata 1.X.1905 bears witness - urgent, searching, unafraid-it's broken arcs invoking the dissonances of modernity's estrangement from nature and the fragile openings through which rebirth begins. Debussy's etude pour les arpeges composes and La fille aux cheveux de lin shimmer with shifting light and color, while Clair de lune unfolds in the moon's tender chiaroscuro, a meditation of light, shadow, and serenity. Mozart's Fantasy in D minor restores grace and clarity not by denying shadow, but by transfiguring it; it's improvisatory nature finds form through discovery. Scarlatti's sonatas dance with quick, inventive pulse: sunlight on stone, castanets crossing through the air. Their brilliance is youthful joy tempered by seasoned experience. Gross's Solace turns inward towards repose. Here the heart practices a different virtuosity - the courage to be calm, to let resonance and renewal begin. Even in this quietude, her music recalls nature's adaptability, it's patient recalibrations in the face of change. Missy Mazzoli's The Elastic Heart of Youth gathers all these energies into a radiant celebration of life. It's tensile rhythms and glowing harmonies echo the supple strength of the living world-the capacity to bend, to adapt, to begin again.

Mel (Melanie Hel�ne) Bonis was born in Paris in 1858, and showed a prodigious talent for music from an early age, attending the Paris Conservatoire from the age of sixteen, studying alongside Debussy and Pierne under Cesar Franck. Her passionate relationship with the singer Amedee-Louis Hettich was frowned upon by her parents, who pressured her to marry edouard Domange, a twice-widowed industrialist with five children. Bonis threw herself into her role as wife and stepmother, until a reunion with Hettich in the 1890s reignited her serious interest in composition. She composed more than 300 works, including pieces for solo piano, chamber music, and over forty melodies for voice and piano. As Bonis was too modest for self-promotion, and a victim of gender-bias, her music fell into obscurity after the First World War, and she became bedridden from arthritis. She continued to compose until her death, in 1937. Her orchestral output dates from two decades, between 1891 and 1912, and is well represented on this album.

Mendelssohn composed in all genres common at the time, from piano music to opera. Chamber music also played an important role with 30 works: In addition to four piano quartets, two sonatas each for violin and piano and cello and piano, two string quintets, a piano sextet and an octet, he wrote seven string quartets, which are now available in their entirety in the gripping interpretation of the Minguet Quartet in this set.

She was a great musical talent and a sensitive soul, the child of a socially aspiring family who forbid their daughter to marry the love of her life; instead she was forced into a utilitarian marriage with a respectable husband, but later had an affair with her first sweetheart after all - the stuff of a sentimental novel. Yet Mel Bonis (1858-1937) was no fictional character. She was one of the strongest composers of her time with a focus on piano, chamber music and art songs. She also enriched the repertoire of impressionism with numerous original gems and arrangements for orchestra. Her particularly modern Ophelia, her purring melodie of an enamoured tomcat on a roof at night, her Spanish gypsy waltz and her dances for orchestra are just some of the enchanting discoveries you will find here. Our recording pays a well-deserved tribute to this noble woman.

Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important luminaries of the 18th century as a composer and theorist, although he kept his compositional and scholarly activities so carefully separate that his pieces show no trace of the considerations of this "sonic scholar". The subject matter of his stage works is something else entirely. Les Indes galantes, for example, draws on the latest ethnological explorations of Asia and America, while the grand opera Zoroastre is based on research into the Persian religious founder Zarathustra, who after considerable trials wins the hand of his beloved and the throne of Bactria. One of the most surprising aspects of this fantastic production is how effectively yet discreetly these exotic subjects were incorporated into the established dance forms of the Baroque period, and that Rameau was even able to stage a Native American rain dance.

SOMM Recordings continues it's much-admired and long-running series The Beecham Collection with it's 35th release of live recordings by Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The recording highlights the operatic side of Beecham with orchestral excerpts from Les Troyens and La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz, and Tannh�user, Parsifal, G�tterd�mmerung, and Die Meistersinger von N�rnberg by Richard Wagner. Producer and audio engineer Lani Spahr, whose work for SOMM on Elgar from the Archives has been described by Gramophone Magazine as "astounding" and "revelatory," is once again responsible for the audio restoration on this release. The professional debut of Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart., C.H. took place on 6 December 1899 in St Helen's Town Hall when he was twenty years old. He conducted the Hungarian March from La Damnation de Faust by Berlioz with the Hall� Orchestra, and the music of Berlioz was to become one of the cornerstones of his repertoire for the next six decades. This present recording of the Hungarian March is a gloriously uninhibited performance that brought the house down at the end of a 1955 concert at the Royal Festival Hall. That concert also included two excerpts from Les Troyens by Berlioz. The Prelude to The Trojans at Carthage is followed by The Royal Hunt and Storm, with the Oxford Bach Choir providing the brief choral contribution from Nymphs, Sylvans, and Fauns. These performances are remarkable for their atmospheric poetry in the slower sections and the rampaging energy in the faster music. During the same year as his professional debut, a young Beecham made his pilgrimage to Bayreuth, and he became an enthusiastic, instinctual conductor of Wagner's music. The renowned music critic Neville Cardus once noted that, while German conductors tended to take a reflective and philosophical approach in interpreting Wagner, Sir Thomas concentrated on the dramatic and picturesque parts of the music. This concentration on colour and drama makes his conducting of the orchestral extracts included on this release both satisfying and full of character. These four orchestral excerpts were recorded at the Royal Festival Hall on 17 December 1958. The concert opened with the Overture and Venusberg Music from Tannh�user; for decades one of Beecham's warhorses as a concert opener. Orchestral excerpts from Parsifal appeared regularly on Beecham's concert programmes, and this 1958 concert featured the Good Friday Music. Beecham conducted a number of Ring cycles during his career, and his affinity with the music shines through in this recording of Siegfried's Rhine Journey from G�tterd�mmerung. This release closes with the Prelude to Act One of Die Meistersinger, about which the review in the Daily Telegraph said, "the thickly overlaid texture of the overture can seldom have been given with such golden clarity."

Who doesn't know this loveable master of light entertainment? asked an admiring critic in 1925, when Berlin composer and publisher Siegfried Translateur celebrated his 50th birthday. Although this rhetorical question does not likely garner even a nominal response today, 150 years after his birth, concert halls were once filled with thunderous applause. The man from Upper Silesia did well for himself with his compositions, not to mention that his student work Wiener Praterleben had just become the hymn of Berlin's Six Day Race and had been transformed to the "Sportspalastwalzer". When Reinhold Franz Habisch aka "Krucke" whistled, the "Nudeltopp" boiled over. But Translateur is so much more. He knows what flowers are dreaming of, he takes a stroll through the big city, waltzes jauntily through life - a charming proponent of a silver era that never really went away.

Expressing what cannot be expressed, what is sometimes beyond understanding, is a task that has challenged composers of sacred music for centuries. In his latest collection of vocal and choral works, award-winning Canadian composer Christopher Tyler Nickel aims to articulate these complex emotional states. The works range from Stabat Mater, an intimate portrayal of a mother's grief poignantly sung by soprano Catherine Redding; a collection of motets, both a cappella and accompanied, including the wonders expressed in a new setting of the O Magnum Mysterium; a meditative setting of the de Profundis; and an uplifting Magnificat. Chorus master Kari Turunen and the Vancouver Chamber Choir join forces with Clyde Mitchell and the Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra in performances that capture by turns the works' peace, grief, hope and transcendence through Nickel's very personal and spiritual musical language.

From the 1830s onward, Liszt's compositions increasingly acknowledged poetic, literary and philosophical impulses, often signaled through titles, epigraphs or extra-musical associations. This stimulus would later crystallise in his codification of the symphonic poem, but it was equally present in his keyboard music, where narrative, rhetoric and symbolism frequently replace abstract formal logic. A central expression of this aesthetic is Liszt's lifelong engagement with transcription and transformation. For him, the piano was not simply a self-contained instrument but a medium capable of absorbing the sonorities, gestures and emotional weight of voices and orchestras alike. His transcriptions were acts of interpretation rather than replication - creative reimaginings that sought the core meaning of a work and translated it into a pianistic language of heightened intensity. Choral music posed a particularly compelling challenge: the task of condensing collective utterance into the hands of a single performer allowed Liszt to explore the boundary between shared musical identity and individual contemplation. The works recorded here trace Liszt's artistic evolution from the assertive rhetoric of his early maturity to the compressed, exploratory language of his final years. Michael Kaykov's selection of repertoire brings together pieces that illuminate Liszt's habit of revisiting and reworking material across decades. Heard in this context, these works emerge not as peripheral by-products of Liszt's workshop, but as self-contained musical statements - compact, vivid, and eloquent - whose significance lies in their interconnections as much as in their distinctive voices.

Louise Farrenc was one of the most respected pianists, composers and pedagogues in the Parisian musical scene of her day, gaining the admiration of Robert Schumann. Her Theme and Variations sets are regarded as some of the most significant pieces she composed for piano. In this volume, Farrenc takes inspiration from the famous bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti, as well as popular airs and dances that would have resounded throughout the fashionable salons of 19th-century Paris. Maria Stratigou continues her acclaimed survey of Farrenc's complete works for piano.

This album presents a new arrangement of Franz Schubert's song cycle Die schone Mullerin, performed by baritone Roderick Williams with the Carducci Quartet. Originally composed in 1823 for voice and piano, the cycle sets poems by Wilhelm Muller that trace the emotional journey of a young miller through hope, love, jealousy and despair. In this recording, the piano part is reimagined for string quartet, drawing out the implied instrumental textures in Schubert's writing while preserving the narrative flow of the songs. The arrangement offers a fresh perspective on the work's structure and atmosphere, highlighting it's central Romantic themes of nature, longing and reflection.

Santtu conducts Shostakovich: Moscow Cheryomushki and Symphony No. 1 is the seventh album from Philharmonia Records. Led by Santtu-Matias Rouvali, these performances were recorded live at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, where they are resident. The Philharmonia Orchestra has an extensive legacy of recording the music of Shostakovich, and in this latest release it's Principal Conductor brings his own distinctive energy, precision, and flair to two contrasting masterpieces: the sharp-witted exuberance of Moscow Cheryomushki and the youthful brilliance of the First Symphony.

This double CD brings together two of the most impressive sacred works of the 18th century, composed in different cultural and religious contexts - yet linked by their extraordinary expressive power: Jan Dismas Zelenka's little-known Missa Paschalis ZWV 7 and George Frideric Handel's Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline HWV 264. In the interpretation of the ensembles Zeronove and I pizzicanti under the direction of Lukas Wanner, these works unfold their full emotional and dramaturgical depth. Zelenka's Missa Paschalis, composed for Easter, is one of the Bohemian master's most original mass settings. It is juxtaposed with Handel's Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, a work of monumental dignity and haunting simplicity. The ensembles Zeronove and I pizzicanti approach these works with stylistic sensitivity and tonal transparency. Historically informed but never academic, they focus on expressive articulation, lively tempi and clear emotional expression.

With If Love's a Sweet Passion, soprano Arianna Savall, tenor Petter Udland Johansen, and the Freitagsakademieunder the direction of Katharina Suske present a carefully curated selection of vocal and instrumental works by Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel. The album illuminates essential aspects of Baroque affect, stylistic hybridity and dramatic rhetoric. It's program brings together Purcell's distinctly English musical language - marked by rhetorical clarity and subtle chromatic inflection - with Handel's Italianate, operatically expansive melodic writing and his masterful shaping of musical character. This recording unites two central Baroque traditions - the English 'consort style' of Purcell and the Italianate dramaturgy of Handel - within a coherent artistic and dramaturgical framework.

Franziska Fleischanderl calls her new CD solo un salterio - just a salterio. This title is not just an understatement, because Franziska Fleischanderl is quite simply THE salterio specialist worldwide. She has devoted herself entirely to her instrument, written a doctoral thesis on the salterio, discovered many works for the instrument in archives, and researched historical playing techniques. The title also refers to the instrumentation: while the salterio is known today only as an accompanying or continuo instrument, Franziska Fleischanderl shows that the instrument was widely used and played in aristocratic and clerical circles in the 17th century. Here, for the first time, she presents an entire CD programme of works for solo salterio, allowing her instrument to shine in many colours. She plucks it with her fingers, with special plectrums, and strikes it with various small hammers - a compendium of playing techniques that she has brought back to life through her research. For the listener, this creates a sensual, multi-coloured world of sound with enchanting melodies full of lightness.

The Minguet Quartet concludes it's four-volume set here, which now includes all of Mendelssohn's string quartets - not only the seven works by the fortunate Felix, who had a musical career open to him from childhood, but also the only quartet by his older sister Fanny, for whom music was only ever allowed 'to be an adornment, never the foundation of life,' as their father Abraham decreed with the declamation of a patriarch. And once again, the question arises as to why it is permissible to shackle unmistakeable talent with the chains of convention. This unique work by the then 30-year old composer soars to masterful heights with it's individual form and exuberant emotions. It is an ideal counterpart to the classical mood of the E flat major quartet with which Felix completed his Opus 44 four years later.

Music for These Troubled Times explores the melancholy of the past through the keyboard repertoire of the English virginalists of the late 16th and 17th centuries, and links this still familiar state of mind with the present - an age of social and political turbulence, uncertainty, and wars - through Maxim Shalygin's KHORA. Inspired by Robert Burton's 1621 treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, which praises music as a remedy for the troubled mind, the programme moves between contemplative pavanes, witty variations, and complex polyphonic works. It includes rarely performed pieces and a first recording of the anonymous A Ground. Recorded on three unique harpsichords, it features a rare copy after 1579 L. Theewes' earliest surviving English instrument, a reconstruction of the original state of the 1612 I. Ruckers transposing double-manual harpsichord and a copy of the marvellous 1751 H. Hemsch.

Capella de la Torre, one of Europe's most renowned early music ensembles, is starting a new chapter: future projects will be released on the Prospero Classical label. This exciting collaboration kicks off with the anniversary album 20 Years of Capella de la Torre, which will be released in the form of a high-quality digipack. With this recording, the ensemble celebrates two decades of intensive artistic work, numerous award-winning projects, and tireless curiosity about the sound worlds of the Renaissance and early Baroque, licensed by Sony Classical.

With his first recording, Himmelsmusik, the Hieronymus Consort explores Sacred Concerts and Songs by the Hamburg councillor, musician, and organist Johann Schop and his son Albert Schop. Both composers were well connected during their time; Johann traveled to Copenhagen together with Heinrich Sch�tz to play at the wedding celebrations of the Danish Crown Prince. Albert received his organ education from Philipp Scheidemann and worked as organist at the Mecklenburg court in G�strow. The concerts shine through their focus on text and virtuosity, and the songs, with texts from Johann Rist's Heavenly Songs, transport the listener to other worlds.

Pocket-sized drama In essence, the texts by Heine featured in this compilation are taken from his Book of Songs. Behind each title lies a unique personal drama, sometimes in an oriental-style setting (Rubinstein's Der Asra) and occasionally in the finest Rhine Romantic tradition (Clara Schumann's Lorelei). They recount medieval episodes, transporting us into fantastical fairy-tale worlds, providing an escape from everyday life into an imaginary scenario. This is the order of the day, just as it was back then, because, perhaps especially in our often unromantic times, it is not such a bad idea to have someone sing you a song.

New York City-based viola da gambist Caroline Nicolas is one to watch - a captivating performer and "one of the finest gambists working today" (Gotham Early Music Scene). With her star rapidly in the ascendent, Caroline has performed with ensembles including The English Concert, Kammerorchester Basel, and Philharmonia Baroque, and collaborated with the likes of Jordi Savall, William Christie, and Kristian Bezuidenhout. For her solo debut recording, Caroline brings out the big guns of the viola da gamba repertoire from France's defining era of the instrument - the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Pièces de viole were integral to the French instrumental baroque, and Caroline's programme leads with selections by the master of the genre, Marin Marais. For contrast, Caroline juxtaposes the first Suite by the iconoclastic Antoine Forqueray, and in between offers a pair of amuse-bouche: an intricate Chaconne by Marais' tutor, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, and a Prelude by the pedagogue Le Sieur de Machy. In keeping with French viol music's nuance and relative restraint, Caroline is accompanied solely by theorbo, it's complementary timbre reflecting the repertoire's aesthetic.

Naruhiko Kawaguchi's A Journey with Beethoven presents a thoughtfully curated selection of shorter piano works and arrangements that reveal the composer's diverse character beyond the sonatas. Performed on three historical fortepianos from the Finchcocks Collection, the programme traces a musical and emotional path through bagatelles, rondos, dances, transcriptions and the Fantasy in G minor, alongside a rarely heard 1822 revision of Fur Elise. The recording highlights the evolving sound world of Beethoven's era while showcasing varied expressive styles, from wit and lyricism to introspection. Through historically informed performance, Kawaguchi offers a fresh perspective on familiar and lesser-known repertoire within a cohesive artistic narrative.

Alongside their respective solo careers, H�l�ne Mercier and Louis Lortie regularly meet to perform as a highly sought-after piano duo. Both born and raised in Montreal, they have formed a musical partnership that goes back to the 1980s, developing a musical intimacy present throughout their wide-ranging repertoire. Their complicity has been strengthened over decades of playing concerts and recording together. This, their ninth album for Chandos, continues their exploration of works by Debussy. The programme features transcriptions by Ravel, Dutilleux, Woollett, Durand, Roques, and the composer of some of his best-known orchestral works (Pr�lude � l'apr�s-midi d'un faune, Nocturnes) and solo piano pieces (Clair de lune, La Soir�e dans Grenade, La plus que lente, R�verie). These sit alongside Lindaraja and en blanc et noir, original compositions for two pianos. Mercier and Lortie alternate the first- and second-player responsibilities in this mixture of works for two pianos and piano duet.

Dora Deliyska's programs are frequently dedicated to a specific theme that links the individual pieces together. At first glance, this does not appear to be the case with the present CD. Yet it would not be Dora Deliyska if there were not, in fact, a-perhaps mysterious-connection between the pieces performed. - Christian Kuhn

Transience is one of the major themes of the Baroque period, and Gabriel Garrido has put together an entire programme for this production featuring works from Baroque Rome whose lyrics deal with the transience of the world. The texts are sombre and brimming with charged symbolism of death - in stark contrast, the music of Giacomo Carrismi, the brothers Vigilio and Domenico Mazzocchi, Marco Marazzoli, and Kaspar F�rster is cheerful and magnificent. The grand seigneur of Baroque music, Gabriel Garrido, works with a large ensemble of young musicians and singers on this recording, which was brought together for the first Rencontre Baroque de Montfrin festival. The result is a wonderful example of Baroque splendour in 17th-century Rome, which sweetens the transience of life for the listener with the most beautiful colours and Baroque soundscapes.