This is a welcome addition to my collection. These little gems sparkle and make me want to look at other Vivaldi pieces. It's time to go beyond the Four Seasons. These pieces show compositional variety, the playing is nuanced and exciting, and the SACD recording is superb.

In 2012, Emilia Amper’s solo début disc Trollfågeln (‘The Magic Bird’, BIS-2013) was a revelation. Not only to those who had never before heard the silvery sound of the nyckelharpa (‘keyed fiddle’), but also for the way Emilia on it combined her roots in Scandinavian folk music with her very own and individual voice. Lux, her new album, confirms the promise of the earlier disc – a selection of her own compositions and traditional Swedish and Norwegian tunes which she performs solo and with a group of musician friends in various constellations.

Along with Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Paganini’s Caprices represent the ultimate solo challenge to any violinist. Itzhak Perlman is one of those who has taken on both, beginning with the Paganini, very early on in his recording career. In 1965 he set down three of the Caprices for RCA, but it was in January 1972 that he cemented his place in this tradition with a complete set that would make recording history.

The second volume in the ongoing series devoted to Prokofiev's symphonic output from American conductor James Gaffigan and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, pairs the final two symphonies, the Sixth and Seventh.

Marc-André Hamelin and the Takács Quartet follow up their 2016 Grammy nominated recording of Shostakovich with a program featuring Franck's Piano Quintet and Debussy's String Quartet. These authoritative performances make an unusual yet apt coupling as each work respectively is the composer's only, unsurpassable, contribution to a genre.

Following a year of Utopia and the completion of The Hermit of Mink Hollow, Todd Rundgren hit the road with a musical retrospective on the advice of Bearsville president Paul Fishkin, who wanted a live greatest-hits record to plug. Ever perverse, that's not exactly what Rundgren delivered.