Performances of the music of Richard Wagner will for many be associated with Ivбn Fischer's elder brother Adam who has conducted complete Ring cycles at Bayreuth & in Budapest. Those, however, who follow the concert schedules of Ivбn Fischer & his phenomenally hard working Budapest Festival Orchestra will know that they have performed the Wagner programme featured on this SACD – or variations on it - to great acclaim in many of the major European cities over the past couple of years.

Since Matchbox Twenty is a faceless group, recognizable for its hits rather than its image, it's easy to assume that the band is nothing more than a solo project in disguise for its frontman, lead singer and chief songwriter Rob Thomas (who should not be confused with Rob Thomas, the creator of UPN's 2005 cult TV series Veronica Mars). Not only is he prominent in the band's videos and press, but he scored the biggest hit of his career with "Smooth," a song he penned and sung for Santana's 1999 comeback, Supernatural. Even though Matchbox Twenty's 1996 debut, Yourself or Someone Like You, was a big hit and spawned four radio hits, "Smooth" was bigger than any of them, making Thomas famous, if not exactly a star…

With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Turkish pianist Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than twenty-five years, in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organised classical music world. He is a pianist, composer and director with firm reputation in Europe, Asia and the US. After spending five years under David Levine at the Robert Schumann Institute in Düsseldorf and further studies at the Berlin Conservatory he came to international attention 1994 when he was the winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions.

Celebrating 20 years in the music business, Pitch Black, allegedly the godfathers of New Zealand electronica, are happy to announce the release of their fifth studio album, Filtered Senses. Since their very first gig at the Gathering music festival on Takaka Hill in 1996, Mike and Paddy have wowed audiences all over the world with their unique genre-bending brand of live electronic music. The secret to their longevity is that if you’re never in fashion, you’re never go out of fashion! In an age when electronic genres and fads come and go, seemingly monthly, Pitch Black have managed to keep their sonic identity due to the blend of two very different personalities and musical styles: Paddy Free, the manic groove-merchant, and Michael Hodgson…

Never let it be said that Lou Reed has lost the ability to surprise his audience; who would have thought that at the age of 58, on his first album of the new millennium, Reed would offer us an 18-minute guitar distortion workout with lyrics abut kinky sex, dangerous drugs, and (here's the surprise) imagining what it would be like to be a possum?

Hope Sandoval isn't the quickest worker, it took Mazzy Star almost 20 years to put out their fourth album, and this record comes seven years after the last one she made with Colm Ó Cíosóig under the Warm Inventions name. Despite the time it took to arrive, Until the Hunter is no great departure for the duo. It features many hushed, lit-by-candlelight ballads, loads of quiet beauty, and Sandoval's timelessly beautiful singing. Songs drift by on a wispy cloud of acoustic strumming, lazily twanged slide guitar, and twinkling keys, sometimes gently pushed forward by lightly brushed drums, sometimes left to float along on their own. New to the mix this time is vibraphone, as played by Sandoval, and a couple songs that stretch her horizons just a bit…

There are in all fty-eight mazurkas by Chopin. Pavel Kolesnikov, making a welcome second recording for Hyperion, here performs a selection of twenty-four, from the earliest examples dating from his teenage years, through to the rich maturity of Op 59 No 2 from 1845.

"The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin" is the fourth studio album by American singer Aretha Franklin, Released on August 13, 1962 by Columbia Records. It was her first album to achieve any commercial success, reaching #69 on the Billboard pop album charts.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer's most successful and well-realized album (after their first), and their most ambitious as a group, as well as their loudest, Brain Salad Surgery was also the most steeped in electronic sounds of any of their records. The main focus, thanks to the three-part "Karn Evil 9," is sci-fi rock, approached with a volume and vengeance that stretched the art rock audience's tolerance to its outer limit, but also managed to appeal to the metal audience in ways that little of Trilogy did.

The Grateful Dead 50th Anniversary Deluxe 2-CD Set includes the original album remastered as well as the full unreleased show from P.N.E. Garden Auditorium, Vancouver, BC, Canada on July 29th, 1966. Also includes four additional tracks from the subsequent night at same venue.

This is Volume 4 in Barry Douglas’s monumental project to record the complete works for solo piano by Johannes Brahms. Each volume has been released to critical acclaim, the first one, in 2012, being seen by BBC Music as ‘a triumph of Brahmsian thought, with playing that gets right to the heart of the composer’. Once again, the album is presented as a stand-alone recital, prominently featuring the C major Sonata, which was Brahms’s first published work. The influence on Brahms of his early romantic predecessors Beethoven and Schubert is obvious here, not only in the virtuoso demands on the performer but also in the opening, which recalls both Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, Op. 106 and Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy.

Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür s Seventh Symphony (2009), dedicated to the Dalai Lama, is a choral symphony like no other. It is a powerful vector-based work in Tüür s new compositional mode, in which the orchestra only intermittently frames and supports the voices. The texts that the NDR Choir sings include words of the Buddha from the Dhammapada but also utterances of more contemporary visionaries, from Gandhi to Mother Theresa.

Giuseppe Sinopoli projects Liszt’s “Mephistopheles” with such unrelenting urgency that he could as well be fighting the devil in person. True, the recorded balance keeps the strings fairly close at hand (the actual sound image is not dissimilar to EMI’s on their Masur/Leipzig Liszt series), but the playing itself has real drive and panache, frequently throwing caution to the winds in pursuit of maximum spontaneity (as regards tempo, Sinopoli beats Bernstein to the finishing post by no less than ten minutes).

Sensational violinist Nicola Benedetti returns with a riveting recording of Shostakovichs monumental Violin Concerto (No. 1). This new recording follows Benedettis chart-topping success with Bruchs Scottish Fantasy (Homecoming, 2014) and Korngolds Violin Concerto (Silver Violin, 2012).