Massenet was not only the composer of Manon and Werther. In the shadow of his stage works slumber many mélodies decked out in subtle and delicate orchestrations, which we are delighted to revive here. These previously unrecorded works have been entrusted to a team of first-rate artists, most of them fervent champions of French poetry and its musical settings.

461 Ocean Boulevard is the second solo studio album by Eric Clapton that marked his return to recording after recovering from a three-year addiction to heroin. The album title refers to the address on Ocean Boulevard in Golden Beach, Florida where Clapton lived while recording the album. The street address of the house was changed after the album's release due to fans flocking to the property.

The song poet, singer/songwriter, guitarist, doctor of musicology and philosopher Allan Taylor from London has been touring the world with his songs for 50 years.

Bilbao is not only the capital of the Spanish province of Bizkaia, but also one of the most interesting new indie bands from Germany.

The Focusyear Band 22, which is active on the jazz campus of the FHNW University of Music and the Musik-Akademie Basel, is also presenting itself internationally this year: for the first time two pianists, Julia Perminova from Russia and Yvonne Rogers from the USA, are playing in the band.

Der Wiener Kontrabass hat fünf statt der üblichen vier Saiten und wird mit Bünden gespielt. Dazu kommt eine spezielle Stimmung, die das Spiel in den hohen Lagen erleichtert.

A puzzling paradox: although Vivaldi devoted over 30 years to composing for the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, no complete musical setting of any liturgy by him has come down to us.

A surprising album narrating a feudal struggle between a heretic woman and a priest in the small town of Charlieu, France…

PRIMAVERA III: the vessel is the third of six albums in a momentous series encompassing 81 world premieres for solo cello. This digital album presents 9 new commissions by THE PRIMAVERA PROJECT for groundbreaking, multi-GRAMMY nominated cellist Matt Haimovitz. Composers from diverse backgrounds respond to Sandro Botticelli’s enigmatic painting, Primavera, and the prophetic large-scale triptych, Primavera 2020, by world-renowned contemporary artist Charline von Heyl.

Alon Sariel makes his PENTATONE debut with Plucked Bach, a programme exploring Bach’s cello suites performed on different mandolins, lutes, baroque guitar and oud, concluding with Sariel’s own Bach-inspired Mandolin Partita. Bach’s suites are often considered to be “the cellist’s Bible”, but the transferability of his music between instruments – a practice to which the composer himself also contributed frequently – seems to justify this fresh approach.

During his long life, the priest, nobleman, poet, and painter from Rome, Ermenegildo del Cinque (1700–73) wrote over 100 sonatas for two cellos and eighteen pieces for three cellos. Although he was a dilettante di musica, he was the most prolific composer of cello music of all time. Yet despite the fact that he also composed cantatas, a serenata and some sacred music, and was a renowned cellist in Rome, he remains virtually unknown today, even among cellists. This recording, made in the theatre of the Palazzo Altemps in Rome where del Cinque often performed, rescues some of these extraordinarily beautiful compositions from oblivion.

Much of Joseph Haydn’s musical life was spent in service at the palace of Eszterháza on the Hungarian plains, a complex of buildings to rival Versailles in magnificence. Haydn’s reputation abroad was, however, already considerable by 1790, and he was invited to travel to London where the delightfully lively and at times brilliantly virtuosic trios Hob.XV:16 and 19 were published. Further trios from the 1760s express music of sheer joy, all performed here by the acclaimed Oberlin Trio.