All Helmchen’s recordings for the PentaTone label have been award winners. The romantic and virtuoso piano concertos by Mendelssohn never became as popular as his violin concertos but are of just as high a calibre. Helmchen regularly works with Philippe Herreweghe and this collaboration has resulted in a very special album.

Hyperion’s blossoming Romantic Cello Concerto series welcomes back German virtuoso Alban Gerhardt for this sixth volume. Henry Vieuxtemps and Eugène Ysaÿe are of course best known for their blistering pyrotechnics on the violin, but each of this eminent teacher-and-pupil pairing also wrote two works—little known today, alas—for cello and orchestra, and what a revelation they are. The two Vieuxtemps Concertos contain all the elements familiar from their famous violin counterparts—long-arched melodies alongside moments of outrageous virtuoso demands. The Ysaÿe works are shorter and make ideal companions.

The Romantic Violin Concerto series reaches Belgium and the music of Joseph Jongen, a composer more celebrated for his organ music now, but who was equally admired in his day for his orchestral and chamber works. Jongen studied at the Liège Conservatoire where he heard the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe and composer-conductors Vincent d’Indy and Richard Strauss.

Philippe Herreweghe’s Beethoven symphonies cycle with the Royal Flemish Orchestra, recorded between 2004 and 2009, belongs to PENTATONE’s most renowned and successful releases. Herreweghe and his orchestra have been widely praised for their lively interpretation, full of clarity. Together, they achieve a historically informed performance while using modern instruments, expanded with natural horns and historical timpani. The excellent sound quality of this recording adds to the extraordinary acoustic sensation. This boxset is now presented in a new, convenient clamshell design.

Hyperion’s record of the month for May heralds a new collaboration with the brilliant young British violinist Chloë Hanslip, the former child prodigy famously signed to Warner Classics at the age of just fourteen. Here, she lends her now-mature talents to the second release in Hyperion’s overview of Vieuxtemps’ Violin Concertos and Volume 12 of the burgeoning Romantic Violin Concerto series.

Hyperion’s Romantic Violin Concerto series reaches volume 8 and the music of the Belgian composer Henry Vieuxtemps, himself widely considered the finest violinist in Europe after the death of Paganini. Listening to the repertoire recorded here, he certainly deserves to be ranked among the most important composers for the violin in the mid-nineteenth century. Vieuxtemps never indulged in sheer virtuosity for its own sake; instead in his concertos and chamber works he brought a more classical dimension to the violin repertoire in place of the technically brilliant variations and fantasies on popular operatic themes that were so popular with audiences.

Flemish music has a rather unusual position in the history of nineteenth-century music, in that orchestral and symphonic music were almost completely subordinated to vocal music. There was little expertise in instrumental music, and this concentration on vocal works (which was seen as part of an inherited French culture) got in the way of the development of an orchestral tradition. However, occasionally a figure would appear who broke the mould. Lodewijk Mortelmans (1868–1952) was one of those responsible for the Flemish orchestral renaissance, and who looked with curiosity beyond the Belgian borders.