On ‘Now & Then’, their latest disc, the Danish-Swedish Sirena Recorder Quartet offers up a wide-ranging selection from their regular concert repertoire, intending to illustrate the huge variety of sounds and moods achievable by just four recorder players – admittedly playing on more than twenty (!) different recorders between them, as well as on a toy piano appearing in the Swedish composer Staffan Mossenmark’s “Childhood.” The repertoire spans from a 14th-century estampie – a renaissance dance – to Chiel Meijering's Sanctus, composed in 2003, by way of Vivaldi and Bach.

The A–Z of Opera 2nd edition has been expanded to include even more composers, operas, and 130 bonus tracks. The 1,096-page book details the lives of hundreds of opera composers, and like the range of Naxos recordings itself, this set highlights the extraordinary breadth of opera and its composers across the centuries in a rich and inspiring resource.

Claude Debussy’s music, as his String Quartet (1910) illustrates, reveals characteristics justifying the Impressionist painter comparison, creating landscapes of sound that can draw the listener into the middle of the picture. Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet (1903) had to be and was compared with Debussy’s. His musical diction – based on Debussy’s – prepared the way for French Modernism. Briton Thomas Adès (b. 1971) is capable of fusing traditional elements from music history, including existing composition references, with modern sound production into an individual, appealing style.

The “President’s Own” United States Marine Band plays more than marches, as demonstrated on a new 2012 recording devoted to transcriptions of keyboard works. Tracks include Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, David Rakowski’s Sibling Revelry, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. You’ll love these concert band renditions of original piano works. (Altissimo)

‘I am an EU singer’, Hermann Prey always said about himself. However, by that he did not mean so much his citizenship of a European Union country as the fact that he felt at home in the fields of ‘E’ and ‘U’, i.e. in ‘serious’ and entertainment music alike. For Prey, this distinction never existed, but only the issue of the quality of music, and he found this not only in opera and Lied, but also in operetta, the musical and the well-made hit. For forty-six years Prey convinced audiences; this five-disc collection reveals his fascinatingly wide-ranging repertoire and interpretative skill.