The fifth volume in this highly acclaimed series, conducted by The Sixteen’s Associate Conductor, Eamonn Dougan, celebrates the music of Polish composer Marcin Mielczewski. Together with Bartłomiej Pękiel, Mielczewski was amongst the most notable of 17th-century Polish composers and was recognised as a leader among his contemporaries. Influenced by the many Italian composers who graced the Polish courts in the 1600s, Mielczewski was a prolific composer. The cross-section of works recorded here shows an exceptionally accomplished musician at work, one whose music deserves a wider audience and who can confidently stand alongside the maestri who came before him and from whom he learnt his craft.

Legendary ABBA songwriter and co-founder to release career spanning 21-track solo piano album via Deutsche Grammophon The concept is an instrumental piano album, featuring Benny playing songs spanning his entire career, including those from ABBA, songs from his musicals and beautiful, emotional solo work. ‘Piano’ takes listeners on a 21-track journey through his acclaimed and celebrated career as songs from ABBA, his musicals and other solo-compositions are re-interpreted as you have never heard them before, performed unaccompanied by just Benny himself, on his trusted grand piano.

Best known for his BAFTA-winning comedy show, ‘Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression’, in which he delighted audiences nationwide with pinpoint-accurate impersonations of celebrities such as David Beckham, Gary Lineker and Jonathan Ross, Alistair McGowan is now preparing for his most demanding role of all – that of pianist – as he releases an album of solo piano works for Sony Classical.

For his first solo album, the clarinetist Raphaël Sévère has chosen Weber’s Concerto op.73, recorded live at a concert in the Berlin Philharmonie with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester under the direction of Aziz Shokhakimov. He couples this with the ‘Silvana’ Variations op.33 and the Grand duo concertant op.48 alongside the pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger. These three works born of the friendship between the virtuoso Heinrich Baermann and the precursor of Romanticism Weber display the clarinet at its most lyrical.

The Ensemble des Equilibres, touched by the beauty and artistic importance of three great works: Jean Cras (1879-1932), Joseph-Ermend Bonnal (1880-1944) and Albert Roussel (1869-1937) ) - a fundamental part of the French classical repertoire, has set itself the task of immortalizing them in the form of a disc, in order to offer the general public the pleasure of discovering them, and to assure to these works the posterity which come back. This one leaves at ARION at the end of February 2017.

This programme stands out forcefully against the idea of a supposed rivalry between the Conservatoire and the Schola Cantorum and showcases techniques inherited from both plainsong and a golden age of polyphony by three generations of musicians. La Schola was founded in 1894 and opened on 15 October 1896 as an alternative to the emphasis on opera at the Paris Conservatoire and to foster the study of late Baroque and early Classical works, Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony. On this release from Mirare, esteemed choral conductor Michel Corboz leads the Ensemble Vocal de Lausanne in a collection of French music written in honour of the Virgin Mary.

Titanic, romantic, impassioned - Tchaikovsky's Grande Sonate is like an Russian epic novel full of landscapes and battles. The composer's more intimate cycle, The Seasons, is like a musical diary - depicting the frailty of human existence. These two works, performed here by Jonas Vitaud, are respectively imposing and delicate, and demonstrate Tchaikovsky's love of the piano.

Francis Poulenc owes his fame to his operatic works (Dialogues des Carmélites, Les Mamelles de Tirésias, La Voix humaine), his treasure-house of mélodies, his concertos and his sacred music, but his output for piano and small ensembles remains relatively little-known. Yet the catalogue of his chamber music comprises more than twenty works, including the Sonata for Violin and Piano composed in the dark years of the war, the only piece for these forces that he did not destroy.

For both Schubert and Schumann, the Romantic poetics of the instant and of eternity became equivalent. With his rare penetration into their world, Adam Laloum has entered by rights into the narrow, timeless circle of the soul mates of the two visionary geniuses.

Winner of the ARD International Competition in 2013, Trio Karenine has been highly praised for their musical integrity and technical prowess. For this recording, they perform Schumann's Piano Trios Nos.1 & 2. Written in a two-week period in 1847, Piano Trio No.1 is justly famous and possibly inspired by Mendelssohn's piano trio in the same key. Composed only a few months later, Piano Trio No.2 has an immense spirit and a beautiful lucidity. Both works are given dazzling performances by this young trio.

After her first solo album of Schubert, Chopin and Prokofiev, released on Mirare in 2014 to enthusiastic acclaim from the press, Yulianna Avdeeva recorded her new album with the legendary German sound engineer, Andreas Neubronner in the marvellous concert hall Reitstadel Neumark, To conclude this beautiful recital, she chose to record the amazing Liszt transcription from 'Aida' by Giuseppe Verdi…

„Join in the dance . . . See how we dance!“ And then „Kiss whoever you like!“ Well, that remains to be seen . . .

Between post-Romanticism and Symbolism, three masterpieces for cello and piano, created between 1865 and 1915 on either side of the Rhine. And two young talents of the twenty-first century who present their enthralling vision of these three facets of ‘Art Nouveau’.

Viewed from a distance, the corpus of the ‘555’ keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti seem like a juggernaut as improbable as it is unsettling. Its dimensions impress, its nature intrigues. Virtually all of these sonatas, written throughout the composer’s life, employ the same mould: a single movement in binary form, very occasionally differentiated from its fellows by the name of a dance or an indication of affect, never by a title.

With these two piano concertos, Jean-Claude Pennetier establishes the authenticity of Mozart’s gift. The tenderness and fire of No. 21 mirror the anguish and inner intensity of No. 24. The two pieces are close to perfect and prove, as Mauriac put it, that: “As long as men inhabit the earth, just a few bars of Mozart can remind us of the paradise we lost, a paradise that may still exist as long as we can hear the echoes of its laughter and tears in such divine music.”