Trumpet was meant to have a bright future after Handel and Bach, but history decided otherwise. Relegated to a military signal role with timpani, it had to wait until the later Romantic period to flourish once again. A brainchild of Andrew Balio, this album showcases his own transcriptions of works from the golden age of chamber music, inviting trumpeters out of the cold and into the cozy world of Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert. Pianist John Wilson partners Andrew for these new arrangements of Brahms's clarinet sonatas, Schumann's Adagio and Allegro, and Marchenbilder, and Schubert's lied 'Auf dem Strom', in which tenor Nicholas Phan gives voice to the text. Thanks to Andrew, trumpeters and music lovers can now enjoy an expanded repertoire which invites us into an entirely new soundworld.

Following the success of last year’s release of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, John Wilson and Sinfonia of London turn their attention to Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel. As in the case of the previous release in the series, this world première recording of the complete score features every note of music played at the first Broadway performance, here in the full thirty-five-piece orchestration made by Don Walker for the original production.

Sir Arthur Bliss contributed two staples of the brass band repertoire - Kenilworth and The Belmont Variations, the enduring success of which inspired arrangers to turn to his other compositions, such as Eric Ball’s Four Dances from the ballet Checkmate and Phillip Littlemore’s suite from the film score for Things to Come.

John Wilson’s third volume devoted to music by Eric Coates combines some of the composer’s larger-scale works with miniatures and two marches. The Cinderella Phantasy frames the well-known fairy-tale from Cinderella’s perspective, glossing over the more brutal elements of the original, with some notably descriptive writing for the dream sequences, the ball, and of course the happy ending.

John Wilson’s fourth volume devoted to music by Eric Coates opens with Music Everywhere, a rousing march that was commissioned by Britain’s first independent TV and radio service, Rediffusion, for use as its signature tune. The concert waltz Footlights is a life-affirming evocation of the glamour of the inter-war West End, created just weeks before the start of the Second World War. In wartime, as it turned out, the demand for refreshing, morale-boosting music would be higher than ever. Coates’s ‘Souvenir’ I Sing to You was premièred on 14 March 1940 – the week in which wartime meat rationing was introduced in the UK.

Sinfonia of London’s second album of works of Kenneth Fuchs features four world-première recordings. Two of the works feature soloists: the Bass Trombone Concerto loosely follows sonata form whilst utilising the full range of the instrument, and revelling in its lyrical side. Eventide, for alto saxophone and orchestra, is a re-working of an earlier concerto that Fuchs wrote for cor anglais.

The Grammy-Award-winning Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is without doubt one of American music’s leading orchestral composers. His orchestral output has grown and developed to encompass a wide range of genres, from overtures and tone poems to suites and concertos (ten to date, including ones for string quartet, electric guitar, and piano, the last entitled Spiritualist), inspired by a diverse range of subjects, testimony to his wide sympathies and fields of knowledge.

For this their fourth album of music for string orchestra, John Wilson and Sinfonia of London present a programme of works by three composers from the Franco-Belgian school of string pedagogy, who were all themselves virtuosic string players. George Enescu studied in Paris and Vienna, spent much of his life in France, and was internationally lauded as a concert violinist and conductor in both Europe and America.

Paul McCartney was commissioned to compose this four-movement orchestral ballet score by the New York City Ballet. While he was not a newcomer to classical music, "Ocean's Kingdom" marks McCartney's first foray into the world of ballet music. This deluxe edition includes a second album of the entire ballet performed live by the New York City Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Fayçal Karoui, recorded at the ballet's premiere in 2011.

Ravel’s early masterpiece, Daphnis et Chloé, was commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes, and was premièred in the Théâtre du Châtelet in July 1912. Described by Ravel as a ‘symphonie chorégraphique’ (choreographic symphony), the work was performed just twice in that 1912 season, and was given only three more performances the following year. Press reaction was muted, and it is now much more often performed as a concert work than as a ballet.

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! was first performed in 1943, and was a significant turning point in the history of musical theatre. It was the first musical to put drama and plot to the fore, portrayed by rounded, believable characters. It swept aside traditions that had their roots in vaudeville – star turns, comic sketches, and endless lines of high-kicking chorus girls. Oklahoma! does feature dance, but in the hands of the choreographer, Agnes de Mille, this was idiomatic to the plot, and revolutionary in terms of the fifteen-minute dream-sequence ballet at the close of Act I. The first collaboration between composer and writer, the show was a hit, running for more than five years on Broadway, and paving the way for their masterpieces to come.

Regarded as one of Europe’s leading horn players, Martin Owen appears as a soloist and chamber musician around the world. Currently principal horn at the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he has previously served as principal horn of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and as solo horn of the Berliner Philharmoniker. Weber’s Concertino was written for the old, valveless ‘natural horn’; its limited range of notes (tied to the harmonic series) was extended mechanically with additional tubing (‘crooks’) and, more artfully, by virtuoso players bending notes, and varied hand stopping. The technical demands of the Concertino are testament to the extraordinary facility of the hornists of the period.

John Wilson and Sinfonia of London release their second album of Rachmaninoff. The Second Symphony was mostly composed in Dresden – where Rachmaninoff was escaping the political and professional pressures of Russia – in 1906 – 07. An hour’s worth of music, the symphony is one of his largest works after the operas, and is widely viewed as one of his greatest works. It was possibly of some significance to the composer, following the less than auspicious début of his First Symphony (which he withdrew after the première).

Rachmaninoff’s tone poem The Isle of the Dead was composed in Dresden in 1908 – 09, inspired by the 1880 painting of that name by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin. The painting depicts a ferryman rowing a coffin towards the Isle of the Dead, and Rachmaninoff, unusually setting the piece in five beats to the bar, captures the atmosphere and the motion of oars in the water in the most extraordinary detail.

Sinfonia of London and John Wilson present an album that celebrates the golden age of Hollywood. Sinfonia of London rose to fame in the 1950s as the leading recording orchestra of the day, appearing in the musical credits of more than 300 films, including the 1958 soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann for Hitchcock’s Vertigo.