It had to be a train. The name of Victor Wainwright's new band and the sleeve image of their debut album is also the most fitting of metaphors. In music folklore, the train might have associations with the freight-hopping bluesmen of yore, but with this restless boogie-woogie innovator stoking the furnace, this latest project is a charging locomotive - surging forward, crashing through boundaries of genre, sweeping up fresh sounds and clattering headlong past the doubters.

The 24 Caprices for solo Violin by Niccolò Paganini are a challenge for every violinist. They request virtuosity at the highest level and they are full of musical color and variety.

The Dutch composer, music journalist and novelist Elmer Schönberger once described the Second Symphony as a sub-genre – of a primarily psychological nature, albeit with considerable stylistic consequences: in a first symphony, a composer will more or less reflect the traditions from which he comes, and in a second he will deliberately break away from them. Prokofiev’s Second, composed eight years after the First, appears to be a defiant ode to the modern era, witnessed by the layers of mechanically persistent rhythms, expressionist harmonies, ostensibly unfathomable forms and its very expansive take on tonality. The work was premiered in Paris in 1925, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky.

After a Mozart release with the Quatuor Voce, Juliette Hurel has devised a programme focusing on Bach, featuring two staples of the flute repertoire: the Suite for Orchestra No. 2 with its famous Badinerie and the Partita for Solo Flute, his only work for the unaccompanied instrument.

Laurent Lefèvre : Nous aurions pu le dédier à la musique française, mais je ne suis pas adepte du cloisonnement, j’aime l’ouverture et la musique est pour moi un language universel. J’ai donc choisi d’associer sur un même album des « tubes » comme la Sonate de Saint-Saëns ou le solo de Bourdeau, à des sonates moins connues comme la Sonate de Lubos Sluka, ou celle d’Hindemith. L’idée que les compositeurs s’inspirent les uns des autres au-delà des frontières me plaît.

Figures of modernity in France and in Russia, Prokofiev and Ravel were both interested in older musical forms such as the suite of dances: through a reinvented Baroque language, their compositional research shed light on all the richness of their musical world. Written in times that were marked by the war and the historic upheavals of the early 20th century, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Prokofiev's Fourth Sonata are linked to the memory of their dedicatees. Between memory and imagination, the works carry on a dialogue…

Der 1660 auf Sizilien geborene Alessandro Scarlatti gilt als "Erneuerer der Barockmusik". Er war Vater von neun Söhnen, darunter Domenico und Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, die ebenfalls Komponisten wurden.

Born in 1548, Tomás Luis de Victoria received his early musical training as a chorister of Avila Cathedral under the tutelage of Gerónimo de Espinar and Bernardino de Ribera – the latter of whom can be counted amongst the greatest Spanish composers of his generation. Victoria was probably around seventeen when he travelled to Rome to continue his education at the Collegio Germanico.

A once-celebrated contemporary of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and a precursor of Schubert in the domain of the lied, Johann Franz Xaver Sterkel (1750–1817) is today almost unknown to the general public. Given the great success of his symphonies at the Concert Spirituel, he was probably the composer most frequently performed in Paris between 1777 and 1779.

Baptiste Romain, director of the ensemble Le Miroir de Musique, has just been appointed professor at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. To mark this occasion, he enriches the Instruments series on the Ricercar label with a recital devoted to the medieval vielle (bowed fiddle):troubadour songs and dances and polyphonic compositions from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries illustrate the various stages in the evolution of this instrument, the ancestor of the violin.

The prodigious Norwegian treble Aksel Rykkvin returns to disc on Signum with a new disc of Baroque works, accompanying the MIN Ensemble under conductor and trumpeter Mark Bennett and their artistic director Lazar Miletic.

Menahem Pressler, a living legend of piano, records his first ever solo album for Deutsche Grammophon, with repertoire by Debussy, Fauré and Ravel.

The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are renowned of their spectacular performances of Bach’s epic masterpiece, which they have toured extensively.

Die Kammerakademie Potsdam unter der Leitung von Antonello Manacorda wurde für ihre herausragende Einspielung der Schubertsinfonien Nr. 2 und 4 mit einem ECHO Klassik als Ensemble des Jahres ausgezeichnet.

None of us knew what to expect when we took the plunge into the first cycle of the Leçons de Ténèbres by Lambert. The secular work of this great master of the French XVII Century – one of the great singers and pedagogues of his time was known to us, each one of us having performed many times his wonderful court airs.