Paul McCartney's second classical work, following six years after his first, the Liverpool Oratorio, is a 75-minute "symphonic poem" which, along with an actual poem printed in the CD booklet, tries "to describe the way Celtic man might have wondered about the origins of life and the mystery of existence," as an explanatory note puts it…

Originally commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for the opening of the Kennedy Center, MASS was a unique theatrical experience – a fully-staged dramatic pageant that mixed sacred and secular texts and used various musical forms from classical, jazz, and rock to Hebraic and Broadway. The avant-garde work, while not performed often, has endured since its world premiere with themes still relevant today. Ultimately, it serves, according to the composer in a 1971 program note, as a “reaffirmation of faith.”

The Bad Dreamers’ highly anticipated second album delivers everything a fan could hope for: Space and Time continues the artist’s remarkable approach to retro-flavored pop music while introducing a greater variety of writing styles and bringing a more personal touch to the lyrical and emotional content…

Having garnered the ultimate accolades from a host of arts review pages for her premiere recording on the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie’s organ and on the double organ of the Taiwanese Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, concert organist Iveta Apkalna now presents her third release on the Berlin Classics label as a triple album. "Triptychon" spans three centuries and three religious confessions on one single organ: Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Liszt and Pēteris Vasks can be heard on this, the first release of a recording played in Neubrandenburg’s Concert Church on the organ which she helped to develop and inaugurated.Apkalna opens the first altar panel with three works by her compatriot and personal friend: alongside Arvo Pärt, Pēteris Vasks is the best known and most often played Baltic composer. “Latvia is Pēteris Vasks and Pēteris Vasks is Latvia”, explains the organist. “I hear the landscape of Latvia in his music, the far horizons of our flat country, the meadows and forests, birdsong and the sea. Pēteris Vasks is undoubtedly a truly Latvian character, though he also breathes the "global air". Otherwise people all around the world would not love his music”.

“Chopin is a composer who has been with me since I started playing the piano as a child. In Japan, where I grew up, it is impossible to avoid Chopin’s music! He is one of the most popular composers for everybody, and all pianists start playing and getting to know his music from a very young age. Therefore, he becomes an essential part of your life very naturally. I have wanted to record the complete Preludes for a long time. It is always very interesting to approach works like this that are conceived as a whole – like the 24 Bach Preludes and Fugues or the Debussy Preludes. Each prelude is individual, and each is in a different tonality so the colour and characters are completely different, and as the structure of each individual prelude is relatively open there is a lot of freedom for interpretation.” – Aimi Kobayashi

Being a perpetual student, Stephan Micus usually makes world music by default. He breathes patience and skill into the exotic instruments he uncovers, but certainly with respectful bending of the rules along the way. Towards the Wind follows in the same exploratory tradition – educated, but unassuming as to the nature of what an instrument is "supposed to do." Here, the album evokes an easily digestible cross section of Middle Eastern mysticism – swirling sand dunes, rust-colored sunsets, and sacred spaces.

After acclaimed recordings of music by the great masters, Lucas Debargue shines much-needed light on a composer he is determined must be heard: Miłosz Magin (1929 –1999). "Magin’s style is capable of both enchanting and surprising us," the French pianist says. "Few composers of his time were so open to cultivating the art of writing beautiful melodies." Born in Poland in 1929, Magin settled in Paris in 1960. After a car accident in 1963 he traded a career as one of Poland’s greatest pianists for that of an imaginative composer who would never forget the traditions of his homeland.

This opus covers so many different styles of music and is a guitarist’s album; however there are many tracks containing other superbly played instruments and wonderful vocals too…

'Snow' is the title Stephan Micus has given to his 18th album for ECM. It is the outcome of continuous work he has carried out on journeys and in the studio since the release of his 'On the Wing' in early spring 2006. 'To me, snow is one of the most beautiful of all natural phenomena', explains Micus, who has been living in Spain for many years. 'It’s closely associated with lasting impressions of my original home in Bavaria, especially the long moonlit walks I used to take when I lived in the Alpine foothills. I've always regarded snow as the essence of magic, even more so today now that there's so little of it and the glaciers are disappearing.' Micus's music has always drawn on impressions of nature and the countryside.

The world-leading choral ensemble blazes a trail with brand new repertoire for voices with their transportive and meditative new album. It transcends genres and embraces renowned composers of alternative, film and contemporary classical music. Mesmerising instrumental and electronic tracks are presented in new choral arrangements, including five brand new works with spine-tingling choral sounds with otherworldly strings and bowed vibraphones.

The oratorios of the 17th century Italian composer Giacomo Carissimi, though distant ancestors of the familiar works of Haydn and Mozart, are quite different in scope and effect. They were church works, for one thing; the Latin oratorios recorded here were composed for Lenten celebrations in a Roman church, for literate worshippers who would have known the texts well and would have been attuned to what the composer was doing with them. Perhaps a good place for the modern listener to start is with the opening Jonas, which recounts the tale of Jonah's placement in belly of the whale and has as its climax his extended intra-cetaceian prayer.

Teresa Berganza Vargas is a Spanish mezzo-soprano. She is most closely associated with the roles of Rossini, Mozart, and Bizet. She is admired for her technical virtuosity, musical intelligence, and beguiling stage presence.

Already a concert artist at age six, pianist Anna Fedorova has made the transition from child prodigy to an international success. With more than 27 million views as of this writing, an online video of Fedorova performing the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, of Rachmaninov, is among the most-watched classical music videos of all time. Fedorova was born in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, on February 27, 1990.

That globetrotting composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote La Princesse jaune in 1872, exemplifying the current craze for all things Japanese. Kornélis, played by the tenor Mathias Vidal, dreams only of the Land of the Rising Sun. Under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion, he becomes infatuated with Ming, a fantasy princess. His cousin Léna – the soprano Judith van Wanroij – despairs of this passion and does not dare to confess her own feelings to Kornélis, who eventually comes to his senses. The running time of this opera enables us to offer a coupling in the shape of a previously unrecorded version of Saint-Saëns’s six Mélodies persanes, thus extending the guiding thread of a yearning for exotic horizons in another direction. Leo Hussain conducts the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse in both works.