Sixty-five years since Pierre Fournier first recorded for Decca, DG is proud to celebrate the artistry of this most distinguished of cellists and his wealth of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips – presented here together for the very first time in this 25-CD box set!

Marking 50 years since the passing of Wilhelm Backhaus (5 July 1969) The Complete Decca Recordings brings together, for the first time, the artist’s complete recordings for the label. Wilhelm Backhaus was one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century and a superlative Beethoven interpreter. “I try to play Beethoven as I feel it, as I try to imagine the man – not what story he is telling me, but what he is feeling […] I want to make Beethoven alive, whether it is romantic or not. It is modern – I want people to understand that,” he noted. Wilhelm Backhaus – The Complete Decca Recordings, a limited edition 38CD box set, is out now and all of the newly remastered albums are also available digitally.

Mastered on Mobile Fidelity's World-Renowned Mastering System and Strictly Limited to 3,000 Numbered Copies.

On Nuevo, a collection of music from Mexico spanning nearly 100 years, Kronos Quartet presents a kaleidoscopic view of a music as diverse as the culture of the country itself. On each track, the group’s sound is transformed, through the collaborative efforts of co-producers Gustavo Santaolalla, the noted Argentinean musician and Rock en Español producer, longtime Kronos producer Judith Sherman, and Kronos Artistic Director David Harrington, as well as through arrangements by composers Osvaldo Golijov, Stephen Prutsman, and Ricardo Gallardo, whose efforts serve to reflect the individual spirit and character of each song.

Digitally remastered edition of this holiday release from the German composer and band leader. On this album, Last leads the band through 10 different holiday-themed medleys plus two additional tracks.

In her debut album, cabaret performer Stephanie Pope chooses songs, mostly familiar, from Bob Fosse's final Broadway musical (more like a revue) Big Deal, which also was the vehicle for Pope's Broadway debut. Like a seasoned cabaret performer, Pope presents a variety of deliveries which are likely more engaging seeing them live than hearing them on a CD. Nonetheless, helped by some outstanding arrangements and musicians well primed to perform them, Pope comes as close to an in-person performance on CD as one can hope for.

“That music, unsurprisingly, is a dizzying mix of musique concrète, electronica, Krautrock and ’80s pop, among much else.“ This is how New York Times writer Giovanni Russonello described this album when he got to preview it last year for a NYT feature on Mr. Opsvik.

Both of Young Flowers' studio albums (1968's Blomsterpistolen and 1969's No. 2) are included in their entirety on this two-CD compilation, which also has a 1967 non-LP single and the three songs they contributed to the 1970 Quiet Days in Clichy soundtrack, as well as three live September 1969 recordings. With English-language liner notes, it's the definite collection of this Danish psychedelic group. As the back cover points out, they were "the first Danish hippy band, the first home-grown rock band to sing in Danish (though the majority of their recordings were in English), and the first to play the States." These are substantial achievements, so it makes a reviewer feel like a party pooper to point out that in many respects, they were a run-of-the-mill late-'60s act. Their debts to Jimi Hendrix and Cream, in both the song structures and the guitar distortion…

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, purveyors of American big band, jumpin jazz and blues have a special holiday gift for naughty and nice fans alike. The multi-platinum selling, Grammy nominated band is back with a holiday album entitled It Feels Like Christmas Time, an all new recording for Savoy Jazz, featuring a mix of traditional favorites and original material.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), one of the most famous composers of the Baroque era, is already an icon in the history of music. Rediscovered in the 19th century, he still attracts the attention of musicologists researching and studying his work. This extraordinary person evokes curiosity and admiration, while his contribution to the development of music cannot be overestimated. A genius about whom, as it seems, we already know so much, constantly inspires and provokes to in-depth research into his life and musical legacy.

The summit of Haydn’s quartet-writing, and of the classical string quartet medium itself. The ‘Emperor’, ‘Fifths’ and ‘Sunrise’ may be the best known of the six—as so often with those works by Haydn which have nicknames—but the others are every bit their equal.

Newly released from Navona is CONVERSATIONS WITH MY SOUL, a collection of new chamber works from acclaimed composer-pianist Bun-Ching Lam. The music sets in different languages the poetry of Shelley, Heine, Rimbaud, and Lasker-Shüller, as well as the poems of 9th Century Chinese mystic Han Shan and contemporary writer Etel Adnan. In a compositional voice The New York Times has called “alluringly exotic,” Lam incorporates baritone voice, piano, viola, flute, French horn, and harp to elucidate timeless works concerning life’s fundamental questions. With a thoroughly contemporary sensibility informed by tradition, Lam’s CONVERSATIONS WITH MY SOUL offers listeners a fitting soundtrack for their own existential ponderings.

With the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 7, published by Artaria “for harpsichord and piano” in 1797, Beethoven expands the scope of keyboard technique and structural proportions. Indeed, some of the passagework in the outer movements must have been prohibitive to most amateur pianists; and the length of the sonata, at the time, made it the longest work for piano ever published, and the second longest sonata Beethoven composed (the record goes to the Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier”). Metric displacements and violent dynamic contrasts inform the opening movement, while the prayer-like Adagio is possibly one of the most extraordinary achievements of Beethoven’s youth. The Allegro that follows, light and playful, is interrupted by a stormy “minore” section that was most likely the inspiration for the first of Schubert’s Klavierstucke, D 946. The melodious but challenging Rondo closes the sonata, unexpectedly, in a murmur.

Trascendo is a thrilling journey through that unknown dimension that blurs the contours of pain and then, guided by a wonderful repertoire for violin solo, heaven and earth come closer. The violinist composers who wrote the four intense, vibrant masterpieces of Trascendo give us their immense talent to show that beyond life there is music. Jonathan Mesonero gives us much more than a virtuous and masterful performance. Few musicians have the gift not to read, but to breathe the score, physically and mentally. He breathes the notes as if they were oxygen that sometimes enters lightly while some other times it is so pure it even hurts. He processes the bars in his bloodstream by sending them to each nerve ending until he becomes one with his violin to transform those notes into sounds full of magic. Listening to him means feeling. Is it not feeling, feeling intensely, what we all look for in music? In a time driven by flat images of perfect unreality, Trascendo is a tribute to our imperfect humanity, to our condition as mere mortals who sometimes are able to sublimate feelings until they become a pulse of the soul that is able to break through the barriers of this world.

Raymond Briggs' animated tale about an elderly British couple living out their last days after the bomb has dropped spawned this hit-and-miss soundtrack, with contributions from Squeeze, David Bowie, Genesis, and a lengthy coda from Roger Waters and the Bleeding Heart Band…