Mavis Staples has been a soul and gospel music legend for more than 50 years. Her work fronting the legendary Staples Singers defined the sound of politically-committed soul and influenced generations of musicians. As a solo artist in her own right she has helped to define much of what is righteous and soulful in American music.

Letters from Lony tells the story of Leonie (‘Lony’) Rabl in her own words. A German- Jewish exile from Nazism, she ran the Café de Paris in Amsterdam, writing when she could to her daughter and family, safe in England; two further letters survive from after her deportation, on the journey that took her via Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Ronald Corp sets Lony’s letters as accompanied arioso, all the more moving for its understatement.

When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she might be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have written or agreed to write for it – in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This second volume presents twelve more pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear.

Argentinean singer/songwriter Teresa Parodi got involved in music when studying singing and taking guitar lessons at the age of nine, soon after participating in different local festivals and having the opportunity to become a backup singer for Astor Piazzolla. Later, Teresa Parodi started her solo career, performing at small venues in Buenos Aires and recording her debut album called Teresa Parodi Desde Corrientes, followed by 1983's Canto A Los Hombres Del Pan Duro, adding music to the work of prominent poets such as Jorge Luis Borges and Jorge Calvetti. In 1986, the artist had the chance to perform along with Pablo Milanés at Luna Park Stadium, two years later touring the U.S. and Europe for the first time. In 1995, Teresa Parodi was voted Best Composer of the Decade, receiving a Platinum Konex Award.

Beloved bluegrass supergroup Blue Highway releases its 11th studio album called „Original Traditional“. The 22-year strong powerhouse band was recently voted “Favorite Bluegrass Band Of All Time”’ by the readers of Bluegrass Today. Comprising Tim Srafford,Wayne Taylor,Shawn Lane,Jason Burleson and Gaven Largent,Blue Highway have produced an eclectic mix of songs ,each with their own appeal.Strong vocals and terrific instrumentation,esp banjo (only one all instrumental track) give the listener something different to enjoy on each track.My favorite? Probably Top of the Ridge with guest vocalist Chad Lane a really catchy slow tune with agreat little simple riff.

The English composer Steve Elcock (b. 1957) spent years writing music without ever expecting it to be heard: based in rural France, he worked as a translator, composing ‘for the drawer’. A recent Toccata Classics recording of his Third Symphony and other orchestral pieces revealed him to be a major symphonic voice. The works on this first album of his chamber music show the same long-term control of harmonic tension, occasionally leavened by a mischievous sense of humour.

The musical language of the New York-based Arnold Rosner (19452013) had its roots in the modal harmony and rhythm of pre-Baroque polyphony and evolved in an array of unusual directions, producing a style that is instantly recognizable and immediately appealing as can be heard in the three works on this recording. Rosners Nocturne suggests the immensity and the implacable violence of outer space, whereas his overture Tempus Perfectum has its starting point in Renaissance dance.

The idea of building great music from modest or fragmentary means has characterized the work of Nordic composers for generations. In Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen’s music, that idea finds a particularly exquisite and absolutely contemporary expression. In Toccata the music glances towards a filmic chase-down, whereas Nielsen in Ophelia Dances claims to ‘hear the dancing’ of that fragile character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The album concludes with Nielsen’s single-movement symphony, Symphony No. 3, which sets in motion a cumulative journey upwards from low to high: a symphonic Tower of Babel, reaching for the heavens.

Known for his highly imaginative and philosophical approaches to his musical presentations, Federico Colli is back with a second album on Chandos. Having begun with Scarlatti sonatas, he now turns his hand to the great master J.S. Bach to explore the relationship between Bach’s music for keyboard and what Colli regards as its transcendent quality, its universal beauty. In a personal note for the booklet, Colli explains how he arrived at the extraordinary interpretations captured here.

Alongside its ongoing much-lauded Copland series, the BBC Philharmonic embarks on a new American journey, this time with its chief guest conductor, John Storgårds.

Elena Càsoli writes of her new release on Stradivarius: “This recording is the opportunity to collect, for the first time on a single album, most of the works for and with the guitar by Fausto Romitelli. I feel really gladsome about the possibility to think up and elaborate this release with Stradivarius. For me, it represents the desire to crown my passionate work of years on his music. These are compositions full of strength and inspiration, with a sound that is vibrante e luminoso!, as Fausto writes on the fifth page of the Solare score. I have invited Teresa Hackel and Virginia Arancio to collaborate because of their bravura and their connection the works interpreted.”

Those who have seen the Quartetto Maurice play live have seen this on their faces, in their gestures: the long sweetness and the angry acceleration, the smile and the serenity, the eurhythmy and the euphoria. The latter has often accompanied their wish that everything should change. We know that when we want everything to change, we evoke fire. Flame, Bachelard writes in an essay, is of all the objects that evoke reverie, one of the greatest operators of images: flame forces us to imagine.

Footprint Records is proud to present an album from one of Sweden’s most remarkable vocal ensembles. Twenty years after its founding in the University town of Lund, the Svanholm Singers has become known inside Sweden and beyond for its unique sound: refined, joyous, razor-sharp and ultra-flexible. In Exclusive, conductor Sofia Soderberg and her 20 male singers present the fruits of their quest to expand the male voice choir repertoire with a selection of works written especially for the ensemble.

There are many biographies of Robert Schumann, but none that gives a real voice to his music – and the life and the music of this great Romantic composer were connected in a particularly subtle way. This new release in the successful series of BR-KLASSIK audio biographies contains approximately 150 excerpts from Schumann’s works; carefully interwoven into his life story, they give voice to his inner world. The mysterious "inner voice" that Schumann noted down in the score of his Humoreske op. 20 thus becomes the motto of this audio biography.

The tonal language of Beethoven’s Mass in C major, the first of his two Mass settings, is that of a personal confession, making the work very modern and forward-looking and opening up entirely new worlds of expression for the liturgical text. It is in no way to be seen as a precursor of the "Missa solemnis' but instead as a highly independent work that set new standards for the advancement of mass compositions in the 19th century.