The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has established impeccable Mozartian credentials with its award-winning discography, to which Mozart: Opera Arias and Overtures is the latest addition.

This is the premiere recording of J.S. Bach's Magnificat heard for the first time within its original liturgical context, alongside the beautiful Christmas Cantata.

The peerless Elgarian Sir Andrew Davis conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in this new recording of Elgars choral masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius, recognized today by many as the greatest choral work by any English composer. Joining conductor and orchestra are star soloists Stuart Skelton, David Soar and Sarah Connolly, who also sings here in the Elgar song cycle Sea Pictures.

Puccini’s Manon Lescaut with Ana María Martínez, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Coro de la Generalitat Valenciana and conductor Plácido Domingo is the dark story of love, betrayal, jealousy and death. Manon calls for dramatic, forceful performances and gets the full treatment here in this new studio recording.

The image of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710– 84) most widely prevalent in our time is that of an eldest son as it were haunted by the memory of his father but who, nevertheless, crippled by gambling and drinking debts, was obliged to sell his share of the precious inheritance constituted by Johann Sebastian’s manuscripts. Yet he was also one of the first composers to carve out a ‘freelance’ existence, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart some years after him.

The foundations of Marc Minkowski’s career lie in Baroque music, and he has enjoyed a long relationship with Warner Classics, but this Johannes-Passion (St John Passion) is his first Bach for the label. The work’s terse drama – here presented through just nine singers – is ideally suited to both his scrupulous musicianship and his keen sense of theatre. The French conductor describes Bach’s great masterpieces as “a journey you have to prepare for meticulously, over a long period of time… You come back from it like an explorer comes back from Everest or the Moon – transformed.”