Judged against Kiss' previous Alive! albums, Alive III doesn't hold up particularly well. Instead of relying on raw energy and ridiculous but dynamic showmanship, the band plays like the professionals they are, performing a competent set that never catches fire. However, if Alive III is judged against Kiss' late-'80s and early-'90s records, it holds up very well. By cutting away the filler that plagued their studio records, the band is left with a consistently entertaining batch of songs served up with style. It might not be as exciting as the first two Alive albums, but Alive III provides more thrills than most of the group's records of the previous decade. Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Smetana's two sets of Czech Dancesthe rst comprising four Chopinesque Polkas, the second exploring other dance forms more associated with Dvoákprovide the ideal vehicle for the understated pianism of Garrick Ohlsson. The evocative tone poem in miniature 'On the seashore' completes the programme.

To follow and accompany Anna Netrebkos latest and highly anticipated VERISMO release, DG presents MANON LESCAUT Live from Salzburg!

The English choral Christmas album has tended toward innovation, and it's good to hear that there's still a place for the traditional kind, with lightly embroidered traditional hymns, just ever so slightly wobbly, but utterly endearing, boy sopranos, and strongly diatonic Christmas compositions that are consistently and simply rapt in mood. That's what you get here from the Choir of Her Majesty's Chapel Royal, whose 17 "gentlemen" and "boys" under director Huw Williams are a smaller group than most of their competition and lend an attractively intimate quality to the proceedings.

Looking ahead to the 300th anniversary of the birth of Haydn in 2032, the Joseph Haydn Foundation of Basel has joined forces with the Alpha Classics label to record all of the composers 107 symphonies. This ambitious project is placed under the artistic direction of Giovanni Antonini, who now presents the third volume, after two previous issues that attracted great attention and received numerous awards, including the Echo Klassik Prize 2015 for the best orchestral recording of the year.

This is the young Norwegian violinist’s fifth Warner Classics release. Early 2015 brought a programme devoted entirely to Mozart, but her previous concerto discs were also notable for imaginative musical matchmaking: Tchaikovsky/Nielsen and Sibelius/Prokofiev. Both concertos on this new disc were written when their composers were in the USA around the time of World War II: the Korngold was completed in 1945, the Britten in 1939.