Like his close friend and colleague Dmitry Shostakovich, Vissarion Shebalin (1902-63) knew a life of both celebrity and hardship: he was another of the composers condemned in the infamous 1948 Party congress in Moscow, and in later life he fought to overcome a series of crippling strokes. But his personality remained undaunted, as his music resolutely proves. This is the first recording of his Third and Fourth Suites and Ballet Suite, all three prepared from theatre music, and showing the lighter side of Shebalin's symphonic muse. They have been recorded by the orchestra of his hometown, Omsk, the capital of Siberia.

Polish pianist-composer Tadeusz Majerski (1888-1963) wrote some of the most interesting Polish music of his day, bringing together late-Romantic sensitivity and the harmonic freedom of Schoenbergian modernism- although primacy of emotional expression was always his watchword. Majerski spent his entire life in Lwow (now Lviv in Ukraine) and so, despite his musical importance, he has been almost completely lost from sight. This first album dedicated to his work presents one of his major scores, the rhapsodic Concerto-Poem for piano and orchestra, as well as two powerful chamber works and a number of representative piano miniatures. Michal Drewnowski is the pianist who has discovered Majerski and is making him known to the outside world- a task in which this release is playing its part.

The American composer Arthur Farwell (1872–1952) is remembered as the leading member of a group of ‘Indianists’ who used Native American tribal melodies in their own compositions. In fact, Farwell’s stylistic range was much wider than is realized today, as this third album in Lisa Thomas’ pioneering survey of his piano music demonstrates. It reveals the influence of both Debussy and Skryabin, perhaps even Busoni and, in the two ‘Navajo War Dances’ here, intriguing parallels with Bartok. Farwell plainly had an imaginative mind with a sharp sense of keyboard drama, color, and atmosphere- and a sense of humor: which other composer ever wrote a ‘Laughing Piece?’ Lisa Cheryl Thomas graduated with a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance from the University of North Texas in 2010. She is herself of Native American stock, counting members of the Cherokee, Blackfoot, and Sioux tribes among her ancestors, and her doctoral thesis addressed ‘Native American Elements in Piano Repertoire by the Indianist and Present Day Native American Composers.’

Lassus’ five-part setting of the Requiem is rarely heard; here it is recorded with brass for the first time, the somber colors of the sackbuts further darkening the tone. Interweaving a number of motets, some also receiving first recordings, and a madrigal on death by one of Lassus’ contemporaries in an organ transcription, this innovative recording takes the listener on a spiritual journey, through the darkness of bereavement to the elevation of the Christian soul after death. Girton College Chapel Choir is an international-prize-winning choir of around 28 members, which has grown in prominence over the last ten years, due to its impressive musical standards, regular recordings, and ambitious, exciting touring schedule. One of the main attractions to students is the combination of low time commitment and high musical standards. During Full Term, the Choir’s principal function is to sing the liturgy in Girton’s Chapel. This includes Choral Evensong every Sunday, and Compline (a beautiful, meditative evening service) on alternate Tuesdays.

Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780-1861) was one of the last of the larger-than-life castrati who had dominated operatic life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Velluti, though, spent his career almost entirely in the Romantic era, singing the music of his day. His style of ornamentation attracted widespread admiration and set the standard for the prime donne who were emerging as the stars of their age in operas by such composers as Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. Here the American male soprano Robert Crowe recreates Velluti's extraordinary sound-world, in a recording that helps explain why such diverse luminaries as Stendhal, Mary Shelley and the Duke of Wellington admired Velluti as one of the most accomplished and inventive singers of his time.

Playing four-hands piano was both vital in the dissemination of music in the nineteenth century and also a popular domestic activity. The French composers recorded here span the Romantic century, from the salon charm of Chaminade and Massenet and the virtuosity of Alkan's wild dance to the innocence of the family music-room in pieces by Chausson, Godard and Ropartz. The original 1853 Parisian Erard piano on which this recording was made combines warmth with bell-like clarity, because of it's straight stringing, allowing it to produce a surprising variety of appealing, expressive textures.

The German violinist, violist and composer Friedrich Hermann (1828-1907) spent the six decades of his adult life teaching at the Leipzig Conservatoire and, although his works include a symphony, a string quartet and numerous other chamber pieces for strings, by far the largest part of his output is pedagogical in nature. But he pumped his teaching pieces full of imagination, as the studies here demonstrate. Even though the twenty Miniatures published in 1881 are intended for student violinists, many of them are tiny tone-poems intended both to engage the attention of their players and challenge their techniques - and their mix of poetry and humour will also reward adult listeners.

The Latvian composer Janis Kepitis (1908-89) has a fairly low profile even in his home country, never mind beyond it's borders. His output was nonetheless substantial, with no fewer than six symphonies to his name, ten concertos, a number of large-scale choral-orchestral pieces, countless songs and choruses and a voluminous body of chamber music - almost all of it unknown. Kepitis was himself a gifted pianist, and his hundred or so compositions for piano show a predilection for the miniature. The works here, most of them discovered among his manuscripts, inhabit a world downstream from Skryabin and Rachmaninoff, with a gentle hint of Debussy and an occasional wisp of Latvian folk-music.

It may be a cliche to write of the clarity of Gallic writing for the flute - the kind of elegance found in the music of composers like Debussy, Faure, Gaubert, Jolivet, Messiaen and Taffanel - but French music for flute does indeed have a sound of it's own. The flute works of Nicolas Bacri, born in Paris in 1961, uphold the proud tradition of his predecessors with textures of crystalline transparency and poised, almost weightless, melodic lines - and reserves of sardonic bite and freewheeling energy as required.

The Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl (1857-1941) - also a pianist, conductor, musicologist and writer on music - enjoyed the esteem of his contemporaries particularly for his vocal music. But his star has waned over the past century, and only a handful of his 238 songs have had recent recordings. In style they range from the simple and folk-like to the dramatic and quasi-operatic; their harmonic world likewise embraces both the diatonic and chromatic, with hints of the influence of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms and a foretaste of later composers. The four song-cycles recorded here treat the grand themes of life: love, loss, death and man's interaction with nature.

Heikki Klemetti (1876-1953) was one of the most important figures in the Finnish music of his day: author, organiser, musicologist, editor, educator, folksong collector and, above all, choral composer. His work as an organist and composer for the organ has largely been forgotten, an omission this first-ever album of his organ music seeks to correct. The influence of Ostrobothnian folksong can readily be heard, and there are obvious points of contact with the musical language of Sibelius, not least in the unemphatic dignity and nobility of the style, with the modal harmonies occasionally calling to mind another of Klemetti's contemporaries: Vaughan Williams

The Liverpudlian George Loughlin (1914-84) was appointed professor of music at the University of Melbourne in 1958, remaining in that post for 21 years. That he was also a composer was generally unknown - a former colleague, hearing one of the pieces on this album, exclaimed: 'That's George?' The earliest works here are audibly by an English composer, one who knew his Vaughan Williams, and blend an honest sincerity with fleet-footed wit. The approach of the later pieces is more philosophical and searching, the harmony more at ease with dissonance and the melodic lines more angular - in both peppy counterpoint and long-breathed lyricism.

The American critic Robert Reilly described the music on Volume One of this cycle of the complete string quartets of David Matthews (b. 1943) as 'some of the most concentrated, penetrating writing for this medium in the past 30 years or more. It is musical thinking of the highest order and quartet writing in the great tradition of Beethoven, Bartok, Britten, and Tippett'. The three works in this sixth volume of Matthews' complete string quartets cover a quarter of a century but share the same basic features, not least a mastery of counterpoint, an impassioned lyricism, a sublimated hint of folksong and occasionally a sly sense of humour, all deployed to touch something essential in the listener. Matthews begins his booklet note with this release by saluting 'my now nearly 30-year relationship with the Kreutzer Quartet, which has been as invaluable to me as Shostakovich's with the Beethoven Quartet, or Beethoven's with the Schuppanzigh Quartet'.

The music of the English composer Matthew Taylor (b. 1964) manages both to honour tradition and pull out some surprises. Clearly in the tradition that leads from Carl Nielsen through Robert Simpson, the works here observe Nielsen's fondness for dignity of expression, the occasional hint of power tempered by an almost Mendelssohnian lightness of touch - and, here and there, a note of levity: the Sixth Symphony, after all, is dedicated to the memory of Sir Malcolm Arnold. The three concertante works are performed here by musicians whose playing Taylor particularly admires.

The organ music of Gerald Hendrie - born in England in 1935 but resident in France since 1996 - encompasses a huge range of influences, among them the organist-composers who went before him (not least Franck, Dupr� and Messiaen), dodecaphony, mediaeval plainchant and modality and jazz. The resulting works are as varied as the styles that fed into them, from grandiose to gentle, from severe to whimsical, from lyrical to lively.