The most beautiful arias from the Vivaldi Edition: Orlando Furioso, Atenaide, Farnace, Teuzzone, Armida, La Fida Ninfa, Orlando 1714, Griselda, Ottone in villa and much more. The album includes outstanding singers and arias that were sensational discoveries when first introduced in this series.

In 1680, Dietrich Buxtehude sent his friend Gustav Düben the score of Membra Jesu nostri. In this perfectly balanced work, he addresses the senses directly, immersing us in the sufferings of Christ: we feel the hammer blows, the heart that stops beating…

“What seems to me to be Mendelssohn’s principal quality is his crystalline clarity. (…) It makes him one of the great composers of religious music. In the direct line of the great predecessors he admired so much, it made it possible for him to efface himself before the divine word and to set it to music with all necessary humility. This is what constitutes the force of the music on this recording.” – Philippe Herreweghe

The violin concerto accompanied Vivaldi throughout his life. And more than any other genre, the circa 220 extant violin concertos reflect the biographical and professional events relating to the "Red Priest". Hence the idea - proposed, we believe, for the first time on disc - of recording 18 concertos, divided into three "seasons" that illustrate the evolution of Vivaldi's art through the three different stages of his career: the early years, his maturity and the late period.

Regarded today as the embodiment of classical music at its most lyrical and poetic, composers have entrusted the cello with some of the loveliest melodies every penned. Yet, when it came to writing cello concertos, for most composers it was a “one and done” proposition. One of the major musical monuments in the cello literature is the Schumann Concerto, composed as Schumann himself said because “there are so few works for this lovely instrument.” In contrast, Soviet composer Dmitry Kabalevsky is one of the exceptions to the “one and done” rule. For a long time dismissed in the west as a mediocre apparatchik, a more evenhanded appraisal of Kabalevsky’s work reveals a consummate craftsman with a natural gift for folk-inspired melodies and vivid orchestrations.

With this second contribution to the Vivaldi Edition, Fabio Biondi and his ensemble Europa Galante sign here the recording of the twentieth opera of the collection - a pasticcio in which Vivaldi ‘recycles’ hit tunes from the ‘World of Warcraft’ operas of his contemporaries.

Pietro Paolo Bencini (1675? -1755) was one of the most important figures in the musical life of Rome in the eighteenth century. His sacred music is on the same level as that of Alessandro Scarlatti. This is evident from the fact that much of his music can be found in copies even outside Europe. The most important part of his oeuvre is in the collection of the 'Cappella Guilia', now the library of the Vatican. Bencini worked as 'maestro di cappella' in the basilica of San Lorenzo in Damaso and from 1743 in St. Peter's of Rome; an important job. His style is festive, full of contrasts and smooth melodic lines.

Grammy-winning conductor Andris Nelsons and his "superb" (The Guardian) Gewandhausorchester Leipzig continue their acclaimed couplings of Bruckner symphonies and Wagner masterpieces with Symphony No. 6 and Symphony No. 9. The symphonies are accompanied by the Wagner's Prelude to his last complete opera, Parsifal, and the Siegfried Idyll.

These reflective character pieces are handled with finesse and poetic expression by Barenboim, who usually plays such subtle Romantic music with great restraint, thoughtfulness, and refinement, and seldom lets its passions get away from his control. To the extent that Barenboim plays with a delicate touch and Deutsche Grammophon's wide audio range allows for many nuances, there may be some concern whether the volume of the recording will need adjustment because a soft level makes the piano seem too faint, while a recommended middle setting yields a more credible presence.

Polish-Swiss pianist Krystian Zimerman releases a further pre-release track of his upcoming album, on which he lays his focus on Brahms’s sometimes overlooked Piano Quartets Nos. 2 & 3, in order to give them the attention they deserve. For this recording Zimerman, whose passion for chamber music goes back to his childhood and has accompanied him ever since, teamed up with cellist Yuya Okamoto, violinist Maria Nowak and violist Katarzyna Budnik.

The Arcadia Quartet’s acclaimed survey of Weinberg’s String Quartets continues with this fourth volume containing Quartets nos 6, 13, and 15.

Francisco Lopez Capillas was born in 1608 in Mexico City, and studied plainchant and polyphonic composition at the Royal and Pontifical University before assuming the post of chorister and second organist at Puebla Cathedral in 1641. Although most of his significant works were composed toward the end of his life–and thus well into what is generally regarded as the baroque period–the Messe de la Bataille is, like many of his other works, ambiguous in its relationship to the musical innovations that were taking place in the old world at the time.

Newcastle-born and -based, Charles Avison issued his string arrangements of harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti in 1744. Forty-two of Scarlatti's sonatas had been published by Roseingrave in London five years earlier and it was these which, by and large, provided Avison with his material. 'By and large', since, as Stephen Roe remarks in his note, the sonatas included only two slow movements and Avison, planning 12 concertos in the slow-fast-slow-fast scheme favoured by his teacher, Geminiani, required 24.

World-premiere recording: Pietro Gnocchi was not only cathedral chapel master in the northern Italian city of Brescia, and indeed for over a half a century until his death at the advanced age of eighty-six, but also a priest, archeologist, geographer, and fluent in many languages. Apart from sacred vocal music, this impressive polymath also left behind several instrumental works: surprisingly, the present concertos for stringed instruments and basso continuo are heavily contrapuntal, much is inspired by the stilo antico.

Everything that could be desired in a historically informed performance of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos is presented in Philip Pickett's brilliant set with the New London Consort, released in 1993 on L'Oiseau Lyre. This version with period instruments and an ensemble of a size according to Baroque norms is much more than a dry run-through of these beloved works. It is a clever and highly expressive re-creation of Bach's most popular concertos, re-imagined through the artistic and philosophical connections and conventions that likely were found in them by Bach's contemporaries, most probably by Bach and the Margrave of Brandenburg himself.