Marko Topchii, winner of the 2017 Michele Pittaluga Guitar Competition, has selected a rich and varied repertoire ranging from neo-Romanticism to serialism, each work offering a unique vision of the instrument’s technical and expressive capabilities. Antonio Jose’s Sonata is remarkably inventive, bringing a new language to ancient dance forms, while Frank Martin’s Quatre Pieces breves, written in the same year, offers the flourish and vigor of contemporary harmonic vocabulary. Ronald Dyens’ Libra Sonatine is one of the most virtuosic and brilliant of late 20th-century guitar works.

Worldwide premiere recording: the countertenor Théophile Alexandre and the pianist Guillaume Vincent dare undressing baroque music in piano-voice. Bach, Handel, Purcell, Rameau, Vivaldi… In 21 pieces, like the 21 grams of soul’s weight, it’s the essence of Baroque music which is revealed, unveiling the modernity of its melodic DNA and its humanity in chiaroscuro.

Thomas Hampson, America’s leading baritone and a champion of the art of classic song — poetry set to music — makes his Cedille Records debut with a program of songs by five composers of the early 20th century associated with the city of Chicago: Ernst Bacon, Florence Price, John Alden Carpenter, Margaret Bonds, and Louis Campbell-Tipton. All of them, Hampson says, “have distinguished themselves in history as great voices of the artistic American narrative.”

With The Liberation of the Gothic, Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix deliver an imaginative reading of music by two English composers active at the end of the fifteenth century, the towering figure of John Browne and the slightly later and much less well-known Thomas Ashwell (or Ashewell). Björn Schmelzer draws a vivid connection between the florid polyphony of these two composers and the freedom of structure and ornament found in late Gothic architecture, notably that of the fourteenth-century Lady Chapel built as part of the “Ship of the Fens”, Ely Cathedral.

For his debut album, Solo Seven, violinist Marc Djokic is proud to present a collection of pieces for solo violin by great Canadian composers. Most of the program selections are the result of his close collaboration with each of the composers. Djokic’s ever-evolving research into new Canadian violin repertoire is the inspiration behind this project. Works by Richard Mascall, Christos Hatzis, Matthias Maute, Kevin Lau, Ana Sokolovic, and Vincent Ho celebrate the violin as a solo instrument, and push the technical, musical, and polyphonic limits of the instrument.

At the beginning of the 18th century Italian instrumental music reached France and began to make its decisive impact. Michele Mascitti was a protagonist of this remarkable change. The young violinist moved from Naples to Paris where he spent most of his long life and managed to publish nine collections of instrumental music between 1704 and 1738. The extraordinary success and popularity of Mascitti’s works allowed him to live for many years as a free-lance musician and to be applauded and admired in the artistic circles of the French capital.

Don Ho employed his talents as a middle-of-the-road pop singer and musical ambassador for Hawaii to launch a mainland career that included half a dozen chart albums, numerous television appearances, and engagements at top venues starting in the mid-'60s.

This new release by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Hannu Lintu includes world premiere recordings of two new works by Magnus Lindberg (b.1958): orchestral work Tempus fugit and Violin Concerto No.2, featuring Frank Peter Zimmermann as its soloist. This release also celebrates the composer’s 60th anniversary.

With Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 by Johannes Brahms and Piano Concerto No. 2 in B major, Op. 18 by Hermann Goetz, pianist Andrea Kauten juxtaposes the works of two masters, who strike the musical-historical situation in the vacuum of the Beethoven succession illuminate in the second half of the 19th century. Both composers see themselves as traditionalists who want to create something new in proven forms. There is, on the one hand, the genre of a young composer who, early on, too soon as a harbinger of hope, mercilessly fails the work. And second, the work of a regionally recognized talent, which can attract the attention of the great German music world before his untimely death.

As Grammy Award-winning musician Ruriá Duprat puts it: "Urbem's sound is so eclectic that a verbal description is virtually impossible. You have to listen to it." Urbem is a quartet whose feet are on Brazilian soil but whose arms are around the world. Their unusual formation, with the distinctive voice of Bianca Bacha, who also plays ukulele, the amazing drummer Sandro Moreno, the precise Gabriel Basso on bass and the talented guitarist Gabriel de Andrade, makes them a truly unique jazz group. Creating the songs on this album involved two years of deep immersion in a living room, where the band would meet, sharing ideas, rhythms, feelings.