The Cardinall's Musick and their inspirational director Andrew Carwood present a further volume of their Gramophone-award winning series of Tallis's sacred music.

The much-anticipated album from the brilliant young American cellist marks one of the most exciting Decca Classics debuts in many years.

Brahms never made a secret of the inspiration he drew from the Beethoven symphonies, but before he published his first symphony - inspired by Beethoven's fifth and ninth - he had struggled for no less than fourteen years with it. In the meantime he wrote many more pieces and his Variations on a theme by Haydn are considered to be a preliminary exercise before venturing on to the first symphony. The opening piece of this recording, the Hungarian Dance No. 14, goes back to Brahms as a young cafe pianist, when he and his father earned a bit on the side in bars in the red-light district of Hamburg and where he first heard Hungarian gipsy music. It was this experience that gave birth to Brahms' lifelong attachment to and admiration for this rich folk music style.

Musicologist Adrian Thomas considered Grazyna Bacewiczs string quartets unrivalled in 20th-century Polish music and one of the centurys most significant contributions to the genre. Her folk-music infused First Quartet dates from student days at the Paris Conservatoire, while exceptional polyphonic skill, intense emotion and playful, high spirits characterize the Third Quartet. Both the Sixth and Seventh Quartets unite tradition with a strikingly effective and highly personal exploration of progressive contemporary techniques. As Lutoslawski observed, in the rapidly changing artistic currents of the times, it was [Bacewiczs] music which helped create that atmosphere.

Armenian-born American pianist Raffi Besalyan pays homage to his homeland with this recording featuring Rachmaninoff’s B Minor Prelude, inspired by The Return, a painting by Arnold Böcklin. The work was a favourite of the composer for his own recitals and a reminder of his years in Russia. Similarly, the folk-inspired piano music of Arno Babajanian looks back to his native Armenia in music that mixes folk idioms with the virtuosic pianism of the Russian school. Besalyan brings their music together in this programme infused with warm memories, evocations of distant lands and reminders of earlier times.

Isabelle Faust has gone back to the original manuscript sources to offer us her versions of these iconic masterpieces of the violin repertoire. In Bach s time, music for solo instruments was still little explored territory, and his Sonatas and Partitas immediately established themselves as a benchmark, technically challenging and brimming with creativity.

International Women’s Day falls on 8 March, celebrating the ‘social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women’. Volume 70 in our Romantic Piano Concerto series champions three female composers, and three works whose in-the-face-of-it-all joie de vivre makes them irresistibly worthy of our attention.