The earliest music here dates from when Mozart was just six years old, the latest from his rst years as a freelance composer resident in Vienna. The distinguished advocacy of Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien, in a second volume of the complete violin sonatas, is equally persuasive in both.

Alfred Hill and George Boyle enjoyed distinguished careers in their native Australia and abroadBoyle's students in New York included Copland and Barberthough both are all-too-little known today. The piano concerto and sonata by Hillthe 'grand old man' of Australian musical life at the timeare effectively the same work, the one an orchestral expansion of the other.

Music for a royal excursion. On 17 July 1717, King George I of England went up by Water to Chelsea, and was entertain d with an excellent Consort of Musick…composed specially by the famous Handel . The fifty musicians cost the…princely sum of £150 but their hunting horns, trumpets, flutes and the rest so delighted the company that the concert was repeated three times in the course of the evening. No doubt the matchless virtuosos of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin will repeat that feat in your living room!

In 1899, Scriabin began writing his most ambitious composition to date: the First Symphony. The work still reflects the influence of the traditional fourmovement formal scheme. The first movement, in sonata form (Allegro dramatico), is followed by a slow movement (Lento), a scherzo (Vivace) and an Allegro, again in sonata form. But Scriabin also framed the symphony with an introductory movement in a slow tempo and a monumental choral finale with a text of his own composition, and it is this movement that can be said to occupy the works interpretational centre of gravity.

This classic 1977 release features a stunning interpretation of Chopin's Préludes by pianist Martha Argerich, still considered a reference recording of the set by many critics. The programme also an equally impressive Piano Sonata No. 2, recorded in 1975.

Here is Pollini in all his early glory, in performances expertly transferred from 1976. Shorn of all virtuoso compromise or indulgence, the majestic force of his command is indissolubly integrated with the seriousness of his heroic impulse. Never have I been compelled into such awareness of the underlying malaise beneath the outward and nationalist defiance of the Polonaises. The tension and menace at the start of No. 2 are almost palpable, its storming and disconsolate continuation made a true mirror of Poland’s clouded history.