Chopin and Beethoven: the piano concertos as chamber music. Since the invention of the piano by Bartolomeo Christofori, composers such as Mozart and Haydn have explored and cherished the new tones and dynamic possibilities that the instrument offers. At the beginning of the 19th century, the piano grew increasingly popular and more and more were built and sold.

The young tenor Reinoud Van Mechelen, whose career is currently in full flower, appears as a guest soloist with today’s leading conductors of Baroque music. He has decided to devote his first solo album to a composer whom he interprets with elegance and contagious joy: Johann Sebastian Bach. The title ‘Erbarme dich’ naturally evokes for music lovers the celebrated alto aria from the St Matthew Passion; but it is also the incipit of a sorrowful, sensuous aria for tenor and flute from the Cantata BWV 55.

In 1638 Louis-Dieudonné, destined to become King of France under the name of Louis XIV, was born at last. Louis XIII instructed his ambassadors to celebrate the event with pomp and circumstance. In Venice, whose commercial vitality gave it a dominant role in Europe, four days of festivities were organised in honour of the French Dauphin, culminating in the performance at San Giorgio Maggiore of a solemn mass specially composed by Giovanni Rovetta, Monteverdi’s deputy maestro di cappella at San Marco, who was to succeed him in 1644 and become one of the leading musicians in Venice.

Contemporain de Vivaldi, Telemann et Bach (qui naquit quand même dix ans plus tard), Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676- 1749) fut le plus illustre représentant de sa famille dans laquelle on était musicien de grand standing de père en fils, depuis Louis XI… En 1710, Louis XIV fut si content d’une de ses cantates qu’il lui ordonna d’en composer plusieurs pour le service de sa chambre, et le nomma surintendant de la musique particulière de Madame de Maintenon.

On her new album, Bach Inventions & Sinfonias, renowned pianist Simone Dinnerstein reconnects with the foundation of her musical career and what she's best known for a solo album of J.S. Bach's keyboard works. The recording was made at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York by Grammy-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. The Inventions and Sinfonias, commonly known as the 3-part inventions, were originally written in 1723 as a musical guide for keyboard players and remain a core part of the piano repertoire for students, amateurs, and professional musicians alike.

Galina Pavolovna Vishnevskaya became the most exciting soprano to emerge in the Soviet Union after World War II. She had a major career on the Bolshoi stage, cruelly cut short due to the political beliefs of her and her husband.

For her third album on the label Sony Classical, Olga Peretyatko returns to her first love: Rossini. Her collaborator on the album is conductor Alberto Zedda with whom she began a working relationship at Pesaro in 2006. The new album will feature arias from Il viaggio a Reims, Matilde di Shabran, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Tancredi, Il turco in Italia, and Semiramide.

After Bach’s Toccatas, the French pianist Amandine Savary offers a fascinating interpretation of Schubert’s two cycles of Impromptus, superb, stylistically free works that are finely contrasted as regards structure, tempo, duration and character. The musical sweep Schubert gives these pieces - associating his name for posterity to that of this new form - enables her to go beyond virtuosity to breathe into them intense, sustained passion with at times unleashed violence.