Pianiste et chef d'orchestre allemand, Lars Vogt a mené une carrière de concertiste jalonnée de collaborations, avant de diriger le Royal Northern Sinfonia et l'Orchestre de chambre de Paris. Né à Düren le 8 septembre 1970, il prend ses premières leçons de piano à l'âge de six ans et étudie à l'École supérieure de musique d'Hanovre avec Ruth Weiss et Karl-Heinz Kämmerling. Après avoir remporté le 2e prix de piano du Concours international de Leeds en 1990, il donne de nombreux récitals et enregistre avec le City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, dirigé par Simon Rattle, les concertos pour piano de Schumann et de Grieg (1992), puis les deux premiers de Beethoven (1995).

5 years ago the Munich Radio Orchestra under Andrew Parrott performed Mozart's Singspiel 'Die verstellte Gärtnerin' - the rarely performed German version of 'La finta gardiniera', which can now finally be released on cpo. A top cast is assembled here: Sandrine Piau, Lydia Teuscher and Julian Prégardien, among others. When this opera was premiered, Mozart was 19 years old - an age at which most composers had not even begun. Wolfgang Amadeus' career as a musician - and as a composer - had been in full swing for several years, however. The work belongs to the genre of opera buffa, within which it follows the type of opera semiseria (half opera) popular at the time. Accordingly, in addition to buffa parts, there are also semi-seria parts and even a pure seria part. The music is of great richness. Mozart shows himself here as a true master of opera buffa. At the same time, the music already points beyond these to masterpieces such as Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. The first two acts of the opera contain large-scale, effective finales.

Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom (French: Astérix et Obélix: l'Empire du Milieu) is a coming French live action adventure family comedy film directed by Guillaume Canet, who also stars as Asterix. A sequel to Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia (2012), it is the fifth installment in the Asterix film series -M- is the alias of French pop enigma Mathieu Chédid, an uncommonly idiosyncratic and far-ranging talent best known to a worldwide audience for his contributions to the animated cult favorite Les Triplettes de Belleville.

While Lajos Lencses may not be widely known to the average classical concertgoer or record buyer, he is generally considered one of the most talented oboists in Europe. He has appeared on over 30 recordings and has actively promoted contemporary music for the oboe. Lencses is not only a virtuoso oboist but is equally talented on the oboe d'amore and English horn. While he has attained nearly the level of acclaim of iconic oboist Heinz Holliger, Lencses has chosen to balance his career as a soloist by remaining the first chair oboist in the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra. His repertory is amazingly broad, taking in works by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, Cimarosa, Handel, Rosetti, Mozart, Dittersdorf, Bellini, Koechlin, Nielsen, Françaix, Martinu, and contemporary Hungarian composers Sandor Balassa, Frigyes Hidas, and Josef Soproni. Stylistically, he is known for his ingratiating tone, lyrical sensibilities, and brilliant technique. Lencses has recorded for a variety of labels, including Hänssler Classics, Hungaroton, MD&G, Capriccio, CPO, and Bayer.

Lucky in Love: The Best of Rick Vito is a compilation album by former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Rick Vito. This 19-song collection features some of Rick's finest work from all seven of his solo CDs. If you love great slide-blues guitar, roots-rock, and soulfully-crafted songs and vocals, you need this CD!

2009 collection of heart-warming tracks by the UK's finest Pop/Reggae outfit. UB40 Love Songs brings together 20 of their best loved tracks that showcases the bands softer more sophisticated side. Featuring the huge #1 singles 'I Got You Babe' and '(I Can't Help) Falling in Love with You', Love Songs also features many more UB40 favorites including 'Please Don't Make Me Cry', 'Homely Girl', 'Breakfast in Bed', 'I'll Be Your Baby Tonight' and 'Don't Break My Heart'. Formed in Birmingham in 1978, and featuring the same line-up of 8 musicians from 1978-2008, UB40 have placed more than 50 singles on the UK charts, and achieved massive international success selling millions of albums around the world.

The “supreme poet of the lute” (Gramophone), Hopkinson Smith creates a subtle, intimate dialogue between Dalza and Spinacino, witnesses of the instrument’s flourishing culture in Italy at the dawn of the 16th Century.

Love is in the air on a 22-track compilation from Arthur Lee's Legendary Band! The oft-overused word groundbreaking could in fact have been coined to describe the brief and brilliant career arc of Love, the pioneering psychedelic folk-rock group that was the brainchild of singer-songwriter and formidable frontman Arthur Lee. They are one of the first fully integrated acts in popular music - the visionary Lee is an African-American from Memphis, TN, who migrated west before finding fame. It's also a fact that Love was the first rock band signed to Jac Holzman's now-legendary 1960s Elektra roster, where they were instrumental in helping The Doors get started. Love's genius 1967 LP Forever Changes is considered one of the best pop albums ever made, and undoubtedly vies for most inclusions on the all-time Top 10 lists of music critics everywhere. Love made four albums from 1966-69 (including that masterwork), and it's from this quintessential quartet of recordings - plus two non-LP singles from the era - that THE BEST OF LOVE draws its incandescent repertoire.

Wilhelm Stenhammar was one of the most versatile Swedish composers of his generation. In addition to writing two operas, two symphonies and two piano concertos, he produced a large number of songs, piano music and a violin sonata. The string quartet genre is a central one in his œuvre. An important precondition for this was his long-standing collaboration with the violinist Tor Aulin and his string quartet, the Aulin Quartet, with which Stenhammar worked closely as a pianist. ‘The Aulins’ concerts in Stockholm’, Stenhammar wrote during the winter of 1896, ‘are an undertaking that is closer to my heart than any other of this kind, and it is no exaggeration if I say that I long for each new concert, and that it is a real sacrifice for me if I am forced to miss one of them. I don’t know if you understand this, but I believe that you will grasp my feelings when I say that for me that the Aulin Quartet is, and with every passing day becomes all the more, the incarnation of everything exalted that I know in the world of music – not ideal, I grant – but, perhaps even because of its imperfections, all the more cherishable. With every day, every hour that passes I feel more strongly that I would not voluntarily give this up, that it would be the last thing that I would abstain from. It has educated me, it has turned me into a musician, I need it and love it.’

Conductor Herbert Blomstedt is a member of the top rank of modern conductors, having held long-term music directorships in both Europe and the U.S. Specializing in Romantic and early 20th century repertory, he has recorded a substantial body of work and has remained active into great old age. Blomstedt was born on July 11, 1927, in Springfield, Massachusetts, but his parents were Swedish, and they returned to their home country when Blomstedt was four. He grew up partly in Finland. His mother gave him piano lessons, and he took courses at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm while pursuing a general degree at the University of Uppsala. Drawn to conducting, he traveled to Paris for lessons with Igor Markevitch. This phase of Blomstedt's education laid the groundwork for his later versatility as a conductor as he studied contemporary music in the fertile city of Darmstadt in 1949, took pioneering classes in Baroque music with Paul Sacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, and took lessons at the Juilliard School in New York with Jean Morel, and with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. Blomstedt's career was launched as he won the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize in 1953 and the Salzburg Conducting Competition in 1955.

This new double-album by pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff includes some of Franz Schubert’s (1797–1828) greatest works of chamber music, including his Piano Trios and the Arpeggione Sonata, in breath-taking interpretations. Franz Schubert wrote his two numbered Piano Trios, as well as the Notturno for piano trio, during the very last months in his life, in 1827 and 1828. Like Beethoven, Schubert’s final works in chamber music are masterpieces of great emotional depth. The famous Arpeggione Sonata (1824) and Rondo for violin and piano (1826) were written slightly earlier, but can also be counted among Schubert’s late works.

The Calidore Quartet begin their new cycle of Beethoven's complete String Quartets with the Late Quartets, a 3-volume set of Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 & 135. Performances of the Calidore String Quartet are renowned for their “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct” (New York Times). Their unique “balance of intellect and expression” (Los Angeles Times) is complemented by the feeling that “four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one” (Washington Post). After over a decade of performances and residencies in the world’s most esteemed venues and festivals, the release of numerous critically acclaimed recordings and lauded with significant awards, the Calidore String Quartet is recognized as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of a vast repertory; from the cycles of quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn to works of celebrated contemporary voices like Grygory Kurtag, Jörg Widmann and Caroline Shaw.

”It was an exciting and challenging process to record the complex structure of 24 études and préludes. Some of the etudes belong to the most difficult pieces in piano literature, and the préludes have intense musical potential. I decided to record the pieces over a short period of time, in order to keep the spontaneity of the interpretation. I am very thankful to the Teldex Team (René Möller and Jakob Bötcher) and the piano technician Gerd Finkenstein for sharing this musical experience together, and creating an exciting recording.“

How to express emotion through music from which words are absent? This album attempts to give an answer to this question. Through works by Italian composers from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the two members of Seicento Stravagante, David Brutti and Nicola Lamon, demonstrate the extravagant styles of early baroque music. During the decades surrounding 1600, the dominance of the human voice and of texts came to be replaced by the unfettered imagination of the composer/instrumentalists that allowed instruments to ‘speak’ on their own, and not only support a sung text.

Following on from his formidable complete recording of the Preludes, Nikolai Lugansky now immerses us in two more major cycles by Rachmaninoff, the Études-tableaux. Like Chopin and Liszt, the Russian composer here transcends every technical difficulty to make room for emotion alone. At once poet and virtuoso, Nikolai Lugansky is unmatched in his ability to do justice to this prodigious musical kaleidoscope.