Playing a brilliant modern trumpet, Alison Balsom engages in an adventurous and thrilling dialogue with an ensemble of period instruments as she performs six virtuoso concertos of the baroque era, originally composed for violin or oboe by Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Albinoni and Marcello. She collaborates with Director Trevor Pinnock – the musician who originally inspired her discovery of baroque music as a child – and a specially assembled instrumental group, Pinnock’s Players. Seeing this pioneering album as “a delicious colliding of the two worlds” – baroque and modern – Alison Balsom explores the possibilities of the piccolo trumpet while savouring the sonorities of period instruments and their “compelling authenticity and ability to reveal the composer's intentions”.

"Rosamunde" is, simply ravishing, one exquisite melody after another, and this performance and recording do it full justice. It well deserves pride-of-place in the collection of any classical music lover.

Cappella Amsterdam does not just sing music that charms and captivates, but does this at the highest possible level. For its performances, the choir has received many prizes and a stream of positive reviews. Cappella Amsterdam offers the classical choir repertoire in all its glory and dedicates itself, every single year, to bring to you the most beautiful and important choral pieces, both old and new. Daniel Reuss is the artistic director of Cappella Amsterdam. Under his guidance the choir has professionalised and risen to international fame.

If, as Liszt himself dubbed it, Hexaméron is ‘a monster’, it’s a monster which certainly holds no terrors for Marc-André Hamelin, and the encounter between them makes for some thrilling pianism. The remainder of the recital—high-octane transformations of nineteenth-century operatic favourites—is every bit as electrifying, from a musician who never ceases to astonish whatever the repertoire.

Gottfried Stölzel was a highly skilled, sometimes exceptionally inventive composer among whose gifts was the ability to devise extremely economical yet musically involving, textually illustrative, structurally refined, motivically fluent cantatas. It’s nowhere near great music, but much of it is quite good, clearly written for singers of some accomplishment, with leanly-scored yet often imaginatively colored orchestral accompaniments. Here are six cantatas from cycles written in 1735/36 and 1736/37, first performed together in pairs for Pentecost services in 1737. Added to the end of the program is another, earlier work that shows a marked stylistic contrast to the later pieces. Most of these cantatas begin with a short chorus, sometimes containing what sounds like a full-fledged fugue that dissolves as quickly as it begins, and then proceed through a couple of arias and recitatives, ending with a chorale.

After three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of the instrument is on full display in Schnittke’s shape-bending polystylistic concerto. The orchestra furthermore shines in a powerful interpretation of Hindemith’s Symphony Mathis der Maler.

In November 1772, as the 16-year-old Mozart was preparing to astonish the Milanese with his third operatic work for the Teatro Regio Ducal, his older contemporary, Tommaso Traetta (1727–79) from the Puglia region of Italy, was presenting the premiere of his second opera for the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. Today, the former’s Lucio Silla is probably better known than the latter’s Antigona. But which is the finer work? On the basis of this outstanding new recorded version, I would say that Traetta’s tragedia per musica in three acts far outclasses Mozart’s opera seria for its consistent musical inspiration and sheer theatrical know-how.

The gentle melancholy of the "Trout" quintet is beautifully realized here by Andras Schiff and members of the Hagen Quartet. The final two movements almost seem to be one longer movement with a unity of expression between them that is most compelling, to the extent that the themes of the final movement have the feel of being further-flung variations of the "Trout" theme itself. The lower strings are particularly effective in these movements, and Schiff's lucid and un-plushy Bosendorfer sound is ideal. The earlier movements had the feel of a Dumka before Dvorak, with their alternation of more assertive and more quiet sections – but it's the melancholy character that wins out and gives this performance its particular force.

Originally written as the finale of the quartet op. 130 and, in fact, finale of the set dedicated to Prince Galitsin (opp. 127, 132), the “GROSSE FUGE” (the Great Fugue) ends today the complete set of Beethoven's string quartets, providing its crowning moment as formally rigorous as deeply human by its search for absolute.

The critical reception of Schumann's violin sonatas, like that of much of the composer's late output, has vacillated over the course of the intervening centuries. Written for and first performed by some of the leading violinists of the day, all three are now recognized for the masterpieces they undoubtedly are, needing no apology: and we are fortunate indeed to be in a position to enjoy such dedicated performances as these.

Joseph Martin Kraus, also named as the "Swedish Mozart", has been many years a shadowy existence in music history. Gluck and even Joseph Haydn saw "a real genius" in his virtuose and nearly early-romantic works. His position as composer at the swedish court under Gustav III. made it possible to have a fix income and a blithe creativity. This CD-Set gives us an overall musical impression about his compositions in all genres: Beginning with the incidental music to Amphitryon, the high virtuos Italian Cantatas, his Symphonies from different life periods, till the early String Quartets- Gluck and Haydn have not been mistaken.

The Second Concerto is more unitary in manner. There are still occasional moments of hard tone from Ashkenazy, but they are less noticeable here. It’s a nice performance if you like a pretty broad first movement, an energetic but controlled Scherzo, a mellow Andante and a Finale which aims more at grace and good humour than anything climatic. The recording is lively with a touch of glare at times.

Maurizio Pollini records Schubert's three great last sonatas, all written in the year of his untimely death, with a delicate and lyrical touch.

Buxtehude’s anthology and some of the most beautiful pages of North German repertory.

Johannes Brahms was not a composer who showed much confidence early on in his career, at least as far as large-scale orchestral forms were concerned. Take for instance what we know to be his Piano Concerto No. 1, which premiered in 1859. This work began as a sonata for two pianos, and then Brahms considered developing it into a symphony. But the shadow of Beethoven's nine essays in the symphonic form dogged Brahms so much that his First Symphony didn't appear for almost two decades. It finally emerged into this turbulent and elongated D Minor concerto and, despite receiving a fairly frigid reception at its premiere, it is a work that has come to be seen as Brahms' first true large-scale orchestral masterpiece.