From the New York Philharmonic's in-house label come three separate and distinct albums of orchestral fare that highlights the trumpet, including eleven complete concertos, all featuring the orchestra's longstanding and recently retired principal trumpet chair, Phillip Smith, in performances stretching across the more than thirty years this most distinguished and honored musician occupied the position, 1979-2013. Album 1, available on CD and digital download, is a 21-track offering that boasts highlights from four of Gustav Mahler's nine symphonies, as well as works by Bernstein, Copland, Stravinsky, Ives, Bach, and others, in whole or on part. Album 1 also includes a 32-page booklet containing photos, notes and essays. Albums 2 & 3, available as digital downloads only, boast complete concertos by Vivaldi, Molter, Haydn and Zwilich, among several other important trumpet-centric concerted works. "For the past 36 years, Philip Smith has presided over orchestral trumpet playing, with a resonant, clarion sound and a reputation for never missing a note." (The New Yorker)

This second volume of Septura’s brass chamber music series takes us back to the 17th century and the music of Baroque opera, in four contrasting works by Rameau, Blow, Purcell and Handel. The astounding variety in content, colour and character of the originals demands especially inventive arrangements, and these pieces are vividly brought to life by incorporating stylistic elements from ‘period performance’. The exhilarating result is a stunningly virtuosic set of new Baroque works for brass.

With Horn6, Joachim Ba?nsch presents the sound world of his instrument to the listener in all it's variety, ranging from solo works and original compositions to six-part arrangements. The recording was completed with the help of multi-track equipment. Ba?nsch notes: 'Dauprat's Sextet has fascinated me since my student days. Again and again, our concert performances of the sextet have come to grief, and even today we consider it barely playable on account of it's enormous technical challenges. I hired a sound engineer and spent two weeks recording it at a church in the Provence region of France.'

Hornist Luca Delpriori has been involved in the Italian classical music scene since the early 1980’s. Since 2006 he has devoted himself to the deepening of the classical repertoire through the recovery of unpublished material and performing on period instruments, in particular the rediscovery of the rich and often forgotten literature intended for the horn-harp duo that characterized the Napoleonic period. He and harpist Paola Perrucci are heard here in a program of works further reflective of his research.

The Neoclassical Trumpet' poses the question: what if the chromatic trumpet and the modern Steinway Grand had existed a good century or so earlier and composers had recognized their duo potential? For this Linn release Mr. Freeman-Attwood reimagines works by Stravinsky, Leigh, Faure and Respighi in new arrangements by pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar. Each of the composers represented here wrote significant parts for the trumpet in various chamber and orchestral contexts. Jonathan broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio 3 and is in demand as an essayist for many major record labels.

Despite differing stylistic and geographical backgrounds, Constantin Homilius, Gioachino Rossini, Antonio Richter, Wilhelm Albrecht L�tgen, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Jacques-Fran�ois Gallay set their unique sound worlds dealing with the technical possibilities of the French horn of their times, thus challenging and furthering the development of it's technical standard. This kind of literature represents a great opportunity for the Leipzig Horn Quartet to once again prove it's unique and celebrated musical quality!

Considered to be one of the best trumpeters of his generation, Paul Merkelo is reputed for his “unusual lyrical gifts” (Gramophone). With the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, he presents three rarely recorded masterpieces for trumpet and orchestra. One work is by the rigorous Alfred Désenclos, a favorite of the academy. Henri Tomasi by contrast, was ever the pragmatist, eschewing systems and methods in favor of a popular aesthetic. Meanwhile André Jolivet belonged to a movement that valued the spiritual aspect of music. The works presented here offer a nuanced perspective on French musical thought and the growing importance of the solo trumpet in 20th century music. On this recording, Merkelo offers a performance that will cement his reputation as one of the better trumpeters today.

Solo trumpet with the Montreal Symphony Orchestrasince 1995, Mr Merkelo is regularly praised by the Montreal press as “a spectacular soloist...a most impressive master of his instrument” (Montreal Gazette), a “great virtuoso...dazzling” (La Presse). He has been featured frequently with the OSM, including tours to South America and Lincoln Center in New York. Paul Merkelo has been featured with orchestras, and in recital, throughout the US, Canada, Russia, China, Japan, Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, France and Thailand.

Kent Nagano is renowned for interpretations of clarity, elegance and intelligence. He is equally at home in music of the classical, romantic and contemporary eras, introducing concert and opera audiences throughout the world to new and rediscovered music and offering fresh insights into established repertoire.

If you are hiking deep in the forests of Sweden, somewhere north of Uppsala, and strange and fanciful sounds emerge from behind the next tree... then it isn't necessarily a moose! It isn't possible for a solo debut CD to be more colorful and bursting with life as this: Lars Karlin, the winner of the German Music Competition, presents himself for the first time on Genuin truly at the center of the action. Together with his musical friends he plays his way through the Nordic compositional landscape and a diverse array of styles: romanticism and classicism, jazz and multiphonics. A must for fans of the trombone and the Arctic Circle!

Composer and Carillonneur Neil Thornock releases a collection of works for percussion that explores the dichotomy between instruments with little sustain and those whose over ringing can obscure and define the texture itself. Featuring performances by acclaimed soloists Matthew Coley, Thornock himself, and the Iowa Percussion Group and Iowa State University Percussion Ensemble conducted by Gerald Morris, the recording culminates with "Lurgy", a four movement work for carillon and percussion ensemble suggestive of Gamelan music.

The Great Gate of Kiev is in itself huge. But with the eight horns of German horn sound plus percussion amplification it becomes gigantic! After their successful Verdi-Wagner Portrait "Siegfried and Violetta" the world-class horn players appear again in 8.1 wide-screen format on their second GENUIN-CD. However, before the listener is blasted away by the sound of the Great Gate, he travels through a veritable musical Jurassic Park: spooked by the Gnome, a witches' Sabbath on the Bald Mountain, and morbid waltzes and emotional suffering with Romeo and Juliet. On the program: Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev - here dances the Russian bear!

Michael Massong’s debut recital on MDG contains a program: lyrical pieces, in large part especially arranged for this CD, display a vocal quality of trombone playing that is without equal. Rachmaninoff’s famous “Vocalise,” the fine emotion of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Romanze,” and Franz Liszt’s “Romance oubliée,” in which Michael Massong teases previously unheard-of vocal expressive depth out of his instrument.

Michael Massong is a genuine globetrotter. Born in Germany, he studied with all the greats of his instrument in Frankfurt, London, and New York and travels around the globe for master classes and solo performances. In order to meet his high demands, he has developed his own series of alto and tenor trombones in cooperation with the Thein brothers.

Michael Finnissy is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our day, and generally linked with the “new complexity” movement. The composer describes Mississippi Hornpipes as a “cut-up” of American folk-fiddle tunes. In Seterjentens Fridag, fragments of traditional melodies and generic figuration are welded together. Irish violinist Darragh Morgan has recorded over 50 CDs for labels including NMC, Naxos, Nimbus, and Signum. Irish pianist Mary Dullea, has commissioned and premiered works from composers as varied as Michael Finnissy, Johannes Maria Staud, Donnacha Dennehy and Gerald Barry.

What if four celebrated nineteenth-century composers—Mendelssohn, Schumann, Bruckner and Brahms—had written original works for brass septet? This disc explores that fascinating counterfactual twist, re-imagining choral and organ works by those composers. The arrangements call on the full dynamic and tonal range of the instruments—often extended with a multitude of mutes—to imitate the expressivity of the choir, the power of the organ, and the versatile sonorities of its different registrations and manuals. In dazzling and varied combinations the arrangers and performers together persuade us that this could indeed be original brass chamber music.

This fifth Naxos release of the music of the Franco-Lebanese composer Bechara El-Khoury features three concertos two of which, for wind instruments, are inspired by specific associations with the natural world of the composer’s native Lebanon. The First Violin Concerto contains allusions to Alban Berg, its outer movements divided by a virtuoso cadenza for the soloist. The composer describes his powerful Horn Concerto as ‘mountains at night… reaching up into the sky and melting into mist and space’, and the Clarinet Concerto as ‘impressions and recollections in which poetic colors link together and disappear, like an autumnal cloud’.

What makes the trumpet such a unique instrument? It is the trumpet’s greatest asset – its sound - that assigns it its special role. I think of Eddie Calvert, Nini Rosso and Chuck Mangione with their ear-catching, uncomplicated yet beautiful melodies. This CD is not addressed solely to trumpeters but to all music lovers. It is a blend of compositions with a distinctly lyrical flavor, only coincidentally by both Polish and American composers, and includes four world premieres. - Sławomir Cichor