George Garzone is a marvelous tenor saxophonist who is also known as a highly regarded educator. Some of people he has taught includes Branford Marsalis, Mark Turner, Joshua Redman, & many more. Garzone's debut album arrived fairly late in 1995 with the main influences coming from Stan Getz & John Coltrane. For this exceptional release, Garzone tapped into his love of Getz as he was paired with Trio da Paz, a superlative Brazillian trio led by the prominent guitarist, Romero Lubambo. In addition, piano expert Kenny Werner also joins this outstanding group of musicians. The casual listener might mistake this album as background music but that would be wrong. A sharp listener will pick up & savour the music being played by these masters. Each musician is tuned in to each other & aware of the right moment to play each note. This is an album that rewards deep listening.

Ragnar Bohlin founded Cappella SF, a professional chamber choir, in 2014. Since then, this select Bay Area ensemble has presented four acclaimed concerts and recorded music for two CDs including this, their first commercial disc. Spanning more than a millennium, this holiday program has something for everyone: traditional seasonal standards, original compositions and arrangements from English and American composers, as well as leading choral masters from Bohlins native Sweden, including a piece composed for Cappella SF by Fredrik Sixten thats heard here in its world premiere recording.

James Ehnes has previously explored Béla Bartók’s concertos for violin and for viola, to great acclaim. This album is the second in his equally successful survey of Bartók’s chamber music for the violin. His accompanist, once more, is Andrew Armstrong, a pianist praised by critics for his passionate expression and dazzling technique.

The unstoppable, 87-year-old pianist Aldo Ciccolini returns with another scintillating disc of solo piano works for the young label La Dolce Volta. Following on his first and highly-praised recording devoted to Mozart, Ciccolini pairs further recordings of Mozart with Muzio Clementi's Piano Sonata No.2, Op.34. Clementi is now known mainly for his pedagogical works, but he is a major figure in the history of music for the piano, and was greatly admired by Beethoven. Ciccolini's Mozart selections include the Piano Sonata K332 and the celebrated diptych comprising the Fantasy in C Minor K475 and the Piano Sonata in C Minor K457. Through their expressive depths and their preromantic accents, these powerful works illuminate the subtleties of the musical progression from the Classic to the Romantic.

Italian born pianist Aldo Ciccolini began studies at the Naples Conservatory in 1934 at the age of nine. While there, he studied piano with Paolo Denza, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni. Today, Ciccolini is particularly celebrated as an interpreter and advocate of the piano music of French and Spanish composers. His discography of over 100 recordings includes the complete sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven and two separate cycles of the complete piano works of Erik Satie. Still an active performer and recording artist well into his eighties, as recently as 2002 Ciccolini was awarded the Diapason d Or for his recording of the solo piano works of Janácek. This new disc from La Dolce Volta features three favorite Mozart sonatas including the 'Turkish March' and finds the celebrated pianist still on top form.