Poulenc the miniaturist par excellence burst into public view, fully-formed in his late teens, emerging flamboyantly into the artistic swirl of 1920s Paris. His fabulously inventive, quirky and colourful approach to writing for chamber ensemble and voice comes vividly to life in this set of early works which capture all of his youthful elegance, wit, and occasionally sardonic humour. Many of these early masterpieces are now well-known in their incarnations for piano; but his sheer inventiveness and joyful revelry in a kaleidoscopic riot of instrumental colour is celebrated here in the earliest versions of such classics as Le Bestiaire and Cocardes, alongside masterpieces more cruelly treated by his contemporaries, the Quatre Poemes de Max Jacob and Le Gendarme Incompris.

Highly acclaimed organist Stephen Farr presents an album of organ works by composer Francis Grier, performed on the American-built Dobson Organ of Merton College, Oxford.

Grier demonstrates an individual approach to timbre and texture in writing for the organ and shows fascinating traits which are a testament to a wide range of musical, and non-musical, influences extending beyond the bounds of the cathedral world to experiences drawn from his years in India.

The album features "A Celebration for All Saints," commissioned by Farr and first performed in 2022, "De Profundis" scored for organ and cello, performed here by Indira Grier, "Flourish and Reverie" dating from shortly after Grier’s return from India in 1990, and "Wir haben schwerlich," composed to join works by a variety of composers in the Orgelbüchlein Project.

The flute concertos by Jacques Ibert, Andre Jolivet and Joaquin Rodrigo together embody a distinctive musical heritage written for the flute in the twentieth century, exploring the instrument's limits. These works are now heard together for the first time on one album. Flautist Sami Junnonen is joined by the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra under the direction of conductor James S. Kahane. The album features Ibert's 'Concerto for flute and orchestra', which is now considered to be one of the most esteemed concertos in the flute repertoire; Jolivet's virtuosic and rarely-recorded 'Concerto for flute and string orchestra'; and Rodrigo's 'Concierto pastoral for flute and orchestra', which has gained a formidable reputation among flautists for it's exceptional technical requirements.

Guitarist James Akers presents Fantaisie Romantique – a collection of premier recordings of significant works by little-known Eastern European guitarist composers of the nineteenth century. With many of the works based on popular pieces of the day, including opera arias and folk melodies, it gives them an accessibility that belies their obscurity and underpins their virtuosity. Having been neglected for over a century this recording attempts a reassessment of these composers and their work employing period instruments and techniques to render them as sympathetically and accurately as possible.

The Rautio Piano Trio returns to Resonus with this second volume of Beethoven’s Piano Trios, recorded on period instruments. The album features his Op. 11 trio – ‘Gassenhauer’ – together with his Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 3, showcasing the young composer’s early mastery of the genre; and his virtuosic Variations for Piano Trio Op. 44. This is the culmination of the Trio’s wider project charting the evolution of the piano trio from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century, with the music of J.C. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, through to Beethoven’s complex and mature realization of the genre.

Keyboardist Steven Devine continues this complete survey of Johann Ludwig Krebs’ significant contribution to the keyboard genre with the third volume in this series dedicated to the composer’s keyboard works. Featuring one of the three surviving Partitas from a presumed set of six, this album also includes the world premiere recording of Krebs’ Six Keyboard Sonatas (Krebs-WV 832-837), that only came to light during the historic restoration of the archive of the Sing-Akademie to Berlin following its removal to Ukraine during the war in 1943. With a compositional style that points to a period later in Krebs’s life, these charming, witty and sometimes quirky works clearly demonstrate the composer’s confident yet straightforward charm.

In this, the final volume of his landmark survey of the piano works of Elisabeth Lutyens, pianist Martin Jones presents further world premiere recordings from this undeservedly neglected composer. Featuring works from across the span of Lutyen’s career, the earliest works to be included on this album are the short pieces Overture, Berceuse, Barcarolle and Dance Souvenance from 1944. The unpublished Holiday Diary from 1949, Helix from 1967, and Three Books of Bagatelles from 1979 complete the set.

In 2015, composer Michael Zev Gordon took up the idea of writing musical diary entries, which has spawned this ongoing series of small pieces for solo piano. With most written in a single day, with only minor subsequent refinements, Gordon beautifully captures a feeling, a nuance, an image and, as is the nature of a diary, often with personal associations. Pianist Joseph Houston sensitively responds to Gordon’s recurring themes of the bitter-sweet waltz, unwavering stillness, elegiac simplicity, folk-like dances and fleeting brilliance.

Celebrated as one of the finest Tudor composers, Thomas Weelkes served as organist and choirmaster at Winchester College and Chichester Cathedral and although famed for his madrigals, wrote more Anglican services than any other major composer of the time. Performed by the professional Irish vocal ensemble Resurgam with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, this album celebrates the sacred music from this prolific composer in Weelkes’ 400th anniversary year.

Winners of the First Prize at the inaugural Birmingham International Piano Chamber Music Competition, violinist Usha Kapoor and pianist Edward Leung present an album of violin sonatas by American composers Amy Beach and John Corigliano. The album features Beach’s large-scale chamber work of 1896, the Sonata for Violin and Piano Op. 34, and her earlier Romance for Violin and Piano, Op. 23 from 1893, together with Corigliano’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. Completed in 1963, this work was originally called ‘Duo’ and is very much intended for two equal musical partners.

The Choir of HM Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace build on the tradition established by it's historic forebears of cradling new church music, with a programme of music for Advent, Christmas and the Epiphany featuring seven premiere recordings alongside new interpretations of more established repertory that has become embedded in the musical heritage at the Palace. The album features music by composers including Philip Moore, Andrew Carter, William Mathias, Martin Hindmarsh, David Willcocks and Francis Grier.

Performing on the Taylor & Boody Organ of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the critically acclaimed organist Stephen Farr presents a rare exploration of the keyboard works of William Byrd on the organ. This historically informed instrument is made in the early English style and makes a fitting tribute in this, the composer's 400th anniversary year.

For over 100 years the only opera by a woman to have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Der Wald is a taut, brooding drama where the simplicity of village life comes under threat from the uncontrollable desires unleashed by the darkness of the forest. Richly orchestrated, harmonically daring, and demanding a huge expressive range from the cast, the narrative drives relentlessly forward from wedding to tragedy in a single act, observed pitilessly by the eternal spirits of the forest. John Andrews conducts the BBC Singers, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and an international cast in the first ever recording of this work, using Smyth’s English version of the libretto.

Franco Alfano was a major musician and teacher who enjoyed considerable success with his operas during his lifetime, but who has been overlooked for decades. Generally regarded as the regenerator of the Italian art song, the works featured in this album offer a generous overview of Alfano’s vocal output, from his Opus 1 Cinq mélodies, written in 1896 when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Leipzig, to Due liriche per canto, violoncello e pianoforte from 1949, five years before his death. Anna Pirozzi has established herself as the leading Italian dramatic soprano of today, performing on the most prestigious international opera stages. She is joined here by the acclaimed pianist Emma Abbate and renowned cellist Bozidar Vukotic.

The harpsichord concertos of J.S. Bach form the origins of the keyboard concerto genre that was to continue to flourish through the music of his sons, C.P.E. Bach and J.C. Bach, and onwards. Here, celebrated keyboardist Steven Devine is joined by members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in this recording that features the Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052, Concerto in A major BWV 1055, and the Concerto in D major BWV1054, together with a new reconstruction by Steven Devine of the Concerto in D minor BWV 1059.

Georg Philipp Telemann was one of the most successful and wealthiest German Baroque composers and his Twelve Fantasias for solo flute, TWV 40:2–13 were written between 1727 and 1732. The pieces are given a systematic structure with the pieces in alphabetical order by key, A to G, major and minor. In these solo Fantasias, Telemann combines secular and sacred music using a variety of forms. Solemn courtly dances and rhythmic central European country dances engage in dialogue with pieces that are more akin to the serious and strictly polyphonic musical tradition of the Catholic Mass. Finnish flautist Sami Junnonen performs on a modern Japanese Muramatsu flute, hand-crafted in twenty-four carat gold in the 2000s.

In their debut album, the Sakuntala Trio presents the world premiere recording of Franz Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat major, D.471, in this innovative and compelling completion by Professor Brian Newbould. Of this first trio, only the first movement and the beginning of the slow movement, were penned by Schubert, before he abandoned the work, leaving a gem of a fragment. The album also features the second version of Schubert’s String Trio in B-flat major, D.581, together with a selection of Peter Warlock’s transcriptions of Henry Purcell’s Three-Part Fantasias.

Pamela Harrison belongs to a generation of women composers whose star shone brightly in the aftermath of the second world war but who subsequently faded into obscurity as the establishment turned towards the Continental avant-garde. Here, the Gould Piano Trio, with clarinettist and project curator Robert Plane, are joined by friends and colleagues in this survey of her work. The Violin Sonatina of 1949 is the earliest work of Harrison’s to feature on this album of world premiere recordings, and this compelling programme also features the thematically linked Clarinet Quintet and Piano Trio, along with the Clarinet Sonata. The short work for clarinet and piano, Drifting Away, is inspired by the W.B. Yeats line ‘All that’s beautiful drifts away Like the waters’.

Alla Milanese (‘in the Milanese style’) explores the connections between musicians at the heart of Milan’s scene for experimental music, c.1592–1626. Alongside compositions from the city’s most illustrious musical families – Rognoni and Cima – The Gonzaga Band has sought to rediscover the music of their lesser-known contemporaries, including Biumi, Casato, and the nun-composer Caterina Assandra, to illuminate a rich and complex network of stylistic innovation at the dawn of the Baroque era.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pianist Mark Bebbington, members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, present a recording of the composer’s almost totally neglected orchestral work, Fantasia on the ‘Old 104th’ Psalm Tune, for solo piano, choir and orchestra premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1950. The album also features the Romance for viola and piano; the ever popular The Lark Ascending in the original 1914 version for solo violin and piano; and the early but ambitious Piano Quintet of 1903, which was embargoed until as late as the 1990s and scored for the same combination of instruments as Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet.

The Ebor Singers, with director Paul Gameson, returns to the Resonus Classics label with an album of American Christmas music. The contemporary American Christmas choral tradition is a remarkable confluence of stylistic confluences, sacred and secular, which reflect the country’s cultural vibrancy more so than other times of year. Featuring works from composers including Morten Lauridsen, Eric Whitacre, Stephen Paulus, Susan LaBarr, Abbie Betinis, Timothy C. Takach, Jake Runestad, Matthew Culloton, René Clausen, Alfred Burt, Dan Forrest and Melissa Dunphy, the ensemble is joined by harpist Rachel Dent and oboist Jane Wright.

Continuing his landmark survey of the piano works of Elisabeth Lutyens, pianist Martin Jones delves deeper into the music of this undeservedly neglected composer. This second volume features further world premiere recordings including pieces from her early maturity such as The Check Book, a compelling collection of twelve miniatures for children; Piano e Forte that recalls Lutyens’s lifelong enthusiasm for the music of Debussy and explores the possibilities of the instrument in a way she had never attempted before; and Maybe–Encore Op. 159, which was Lutyens’s final work for piano composed in 1982. Also included is an early unpublished sonata movement (Allegro molto) possibly written as early as the 1930s.

Following the BBC Music Magazine Opera Award for his recording of Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master, conductor John Andrews returns with the world premiere professional recording of John Frederick Lampe’s operatic comedy The Dragon of Wantley. With librettist Henry Carey, Lampe combines a first-rate score with a quintessentially English plot, told in a tone of earthy satire, pastiching opera’s conventions with skill and affection, but also a razor wit. A rapacious dragon has been terrorizing a Yorkshire Village. Gubbins and his daughter Margery, together with Mauxalinda decide to seek the help of Moore of Moore Hall. Moore needs persuading away from his beer but succumbs to Margery’s pleading, and her promises of love. Unfortunately, he had already promised to marry Mauxalinda and so the love triangle has to be resolved in dramatic fashion before Moore heads out and defeats the dragon, restoring harmony and prosperity to the village.

A close contemporary of Buxtehude, Johann Pachelbel was, by all accounts, an outstanding keyboard player himself, and his compositions provide a fascinating stylistic bridge between early-Baroque composers such as Frescobaldi and Froberger (both of whom influenced him) and the later music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries. Organist Matthew Owens continues his major exploration of the many extant organ works of Pachelbel with this second volume, recorded on a recent instrument by the renowned French organ builder, Bernard Aubertin. The recital includes Pachelbel’s largest set of Magnificat Fugues – 23 in total – alongside free works and chorale-based works.

Devoted to the music of Ivan Klinger, this album of premiere recordings from guitarist James Akers highlights works from this relatively unknown composer. Klinger’s seeming anonymity belies the composer’s substantial and high-quality oeuvre. Born in 1818 in Seltz near Kherson (today’s Ukraine), Klinger was one of the few guitarists to devote himself to the Western style six-string guitar. Featuring both original compositions and arrangements of other works, Klinger’s playful and serious, virtuosic and challenging music here receives the attention that is long overdue.