Grammy®-nominated and Emmy Award-winning conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya leading the Norwegian Radio Orchestra introduces his fifth album for the prestigious international label, New South American Discoveries. In addition to his positions as music director with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, the Peruvian-born conductor is also Founder and Artistic Director of Caminos del Inka, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to performing and promoting the music of the Americas.

"That’s it done at last, this blasted sonata! Will it please or not? That is the question." So wrote Saint-Saëns, not without humour, of his second ‘quadruped’ for cello and piano. He adored the cello, as is shown by much more than the famous 'Swan'. He wrote three sonatas for it, but unfortunately the last two movements of the Third Sonata have been lost and what is left survives only in manuscript. Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel play it here with emotion and total respect. The Concerto also included here is today one of the ‘musts’ of the concertante repertory for cello.

This is the pianist Menahem Pressler’s second disc for La Dolce Volta, recorded at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in September 2014. Here we meet a Mozart bathed in total serenity, as if freed from all earthly contingencies and tensions, gently singing of his state of grace, with a wonderfully tender touch. An interpretation deeply moving in its very simplicity, its sheer tranquil poetry, brimming with love and affection. Here is a miraculous disc by a humble servant of music at the peak of his inspiration.

This extra helping of Beethoven’s music for winds comes on the heels of Les Vents Français’s recent triple-CD release Winds & Piano, praised by The Telegraph for “stylistically sure and interpretatively ear-catching” performances, including one of Beethoven’s Op.16 Quintet, which earned the group added plaudits for “astutely balanced and finely observed” playing. This recording offers much more of a good thing, with Beethoven grouping the winds in a variety of smaller combinations.

Going well beyond mere historical interest, this album unveils the charms of a repertoire that delighted Parisian concert halls and salons throughout the 19th century. It demonstrates how the viola finally emerged from the violin’s shadow thanks to virtuoso playing, now resuscitated by the talent of Antoine Tamestit and Cédric Tiberghien in pieces which offer much more than the exquisite languors of bel canto. Italian for 'beautiful singing' or 'beautiful song', the term remains vague and ambiguous but is commonly used to evoke a lost singing tradition; in this case the famed singing tone of Antoine Tamestit's viola, a 1672 Stradivarius, loaned by the Habisreutinger Foundation.

Recorded at the Cité de la Musique during the complete cycle of Monteverdi madrigals mounted in partnership with the Philharmonie de Paris and the Théâtre de Caen, the last volume in our trilogy probably contains the best-loved gems of a composer who had become maestro di cappella at St Mark’s in Venice, and finally entered the priesthood. Alongside the great operas that have survived from this period, the final madrigals methodically explore the multiple possibilities offered by the rapidly developing practice of basso continuo and by an unprecedented exploitation of solo voices.

Giacomo Meyerbeer, the master of Parisian grand opera, was hugely successful in his time and a major influence on Verdi and Wagner. His music has fascinated Diana Damrau since her student days. With her brilliant coloratura, lyricism and dramatic power, the soprano rises triumphantly to the vocal and expressive challenges of arias from 10 of his operas, singing in French, Italian and German. Two of the arias receive their world premiere recording with this album.

Following the Matthias Goerne Schubert Edition for harmonia mundi, a venture that has revealed his stature as the foremost interpreter of lieder, especially at its darkest, Matthias Goerne has now selected 19 gems, lovingly fashioned by Schumann in the year of his marriage (1840). They are contrasted with those of the Düsseldorf period (1849-52). From the fragrant flowers of the bouquet of 'Myrtles' to the nocturnal atmosphere of the 'Six Poems and Requiem' the mood spans Schumman's joy in his marriage to his beloved Clara but also the darkest despair: in which he erects a worthy monument to his soulmate, the poet and arch-melancholic of his time, Nikolaus Lenau.