Open the door onto one of the best-kept secrets of medieval music… It is the music from the Winchester Troper, one of the earliest, and most stunning sources of medieval polyphonic music, written in the first decades of the eleventh century, more than two centuries before the manuscripts of Notre-Dame polyphony. Without the existence of this repertory, our vision of music history would have been entirely different, and much poorer. Ensemble Dialogos offers a musical creation, placing the polyphonic music of tenth- and eleventh-century Winchester in a dialogue with virtuosic improvisations, while telling the story of a man haunted by visionary and terrifying dreams, as he tries to escape from three raging naked Furies, and finally finds salvation through Saint Swithun, a medieval Anglo-Saxon Superman. As you prepare to discover an unknown musical repertory from medieval England, you will be drawn into a stunning story about demons, dreams and miraculous healing, wondering whether the music you are listening to is archaic or incredibly modern.

The sonata concertata form is perfectly illustrated in these trios by Dietrich Buxtehude which, according to Peter Wollny constitute ‘a landmark in the history of the sonata’. They provide a better understanding of a composer who has owed his fame chiefly associated to his cantatas and organ works, and to the admiration of the young Johann Sebastian Bach, who walked 400 kilometres to hear him play. After recording Buxtehude’s first set of chamber sonatas (ALPHA367), the musicians of Arcangelo (Sophie Gent, Jonathan Manson, Thomas Dunford and Jonathan Cohen) now revive the pieces from the second collection, published in 1696. It shows the multiple European influences (Baltic, Italian, German, French) that flourished in Lübeck, the north German city where Buxtehude worked as organist of the Marienkirche, but also in Hamburg, where the music was type set.

Nicolò Paganini’s Quartets for Strings and Guitar are among his finest chamber compositions. The First Guitar Quartet was a wedding gift from Paganini to his younger sister; and both this and the Second Quartet share neo-classical poise with warmly expressive romantic lyricism. The Ninth Quartet features sweet and melancholy moods containing some of Paganini’s most disarmingly simple melodies, and as the composer himself stated, ‘a very fanciful minuet and a moving trio’.

For their third album on Alpha, the musicians of Nevermind – Anna Besson (flute), Louis Creac’h (viola), Robin Pharo (viola da gamba) and Jean Rondeau (harpsichord) – explore the riches of a little-played repertory, the quartets and sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Eustache du Caurroy is one of the unacknowledged masters of French Renaissaice polyphony whose works are rarely performed, due in part to the general lack of accessible or reliable editions. The majority of his compositions were for liturgical use - probably at the French Royal Court during the reigns of the successive monarchs Charles IX, Henri III and Henri IV. The motets recorded here illustrate two contrasting styles of vocal writing: imitative polyphony and 'musique mesurée', the former equating to the familiar, pan-European idiom of Palestrina and his later Renaissance contemporaries, the latter outlining protracted chord-against chord movement reflecting the natural stress-patterns of the words. The Missa pro Defunctis, the major work on this disc, was first performed at the funeral of Henri IV and remained for many years the official requiem sung at funerals of French monarchs.

German hard rock veterans SCORPIONS will release "Get Your Sting & Blackout - Live In 3D" on Blu-ray on December 6 via Sony. The disc contains a recording of the band's April 15, 2011 concert in Saarbrucken, Germany using the latest 3D technology, 11 cameras, awesome 5.1.

The Mozartists continue their MOZART 250 project of staging operas by Mozart and his contemporaries with their recording of the UK premiére of Niccolò Jommelli’s Il Vologeso, first performed over 250 years ago on 11 February 1766 for the Stuttgart court in Ludwigsburg. For this eagerly awaited performance The Mozartists assembled a superb young cast, headed by the Irish mezzo-soprano Rachel Kelly, a graduate of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artist Programme, tenor Stuart Jackson, a former Mozartists Associate Artist, and soprano Gemma Lois Summerfield, winner of the 2015 Kathleen Ferrier Award.

Folk Songs from the Eastern Counties is is the third in a series of four albums recording all 81 of the folk songs in English that Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged for voice and piano or violin. 57 of the 81 songs have not previously been recorded in these arrangements.

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his 10 Violin Sonatas between 1797 and 1812. The Sonatas 1 to 9 were written between 1797 and 1803 before almost ten years passed until his opus 96. The composer premiered all his early piano works himself, which might be why he called them 'Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin.' In the spirit of W. A. Mozart's redefinition of the genre, who elevated the violin from its previously only accompanying role, and in spite of today's common designation as 'violin sonatas,' both instrumental parts in Beethoven's sonatas are on an equal musical footing. In 2020 - the anniversary year surrounding Beethoven's 250th birthday - the Korean violinist Clara-Jumi Kang and her partner on the piano, Sunwook Kim, took on this special cycle of chamber music works.