There is no string quartet that has ever been written that can compare length and diversity with Terry Riley's Salome Dances for Peace. Morton Feldman has written a longer one, but it is confined to his brilliant field of notational relationships and open tonal spaces. Riley's magnum opus, which dwarfs Beethoven's longest quartet by three, is a collection of so many different kinds of music, many of which had never been in string quartet form before and even more of which would – or should – never be rubbing up against one another in the same construct. Riley is a musical polymath, interested in music from all periods and cultures: there are trace elements of jazz and blues up against Indian classical music, North African Berber folk melodies, Native American ceremonial music, South American shamanistic power melodies – and many more. The reason they are brought together in this way is for the telling of an allegorical story. In Riley's re-examining Salome's place in history, he finds a way to redeem both her and the world through her talent.

With this disc, Miklós Spányi’s survey of the complete keyboard concertos of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, begun in 1995, reaches its conclusion. But over the years it has already been described as ‘a unique monument to one of the 18th century's most underrated composers’ (Gramophone) as well as ‘one of the most important and monumental recording projects of the century so far’ (MusicWeb International) and ‘an epoch-making achievement… in the history of recorded music’ (klassik-heute.de). Together, the 64 works – composed over a period of fifty-five years (1733-88) – form an endlessly fascinating picture of their composer’s various choices made in the course of a long career.

Donizetti Edition with the Pleyel Quartet Gaetano Donizetti not only was very well acquainted with the Viennese models that then were dominant on the international market; at the latest since his study years in Bologna he had also been familiar with the most important exponents of Italian quartet culture. This is why his string quartets offer valuable insights into his education and early artistic development and are important documents attesting to the existence of a chamber music culture specific to Bergamo. In Quartets Nos. 4-6 conventional and innovative elements combine to form an astonishing synthesis.

Given the paucity of César Franck's piano music on disc, Nikolai Lugansky's focus on this composer is to be commended. On his third release for harmonia mundi, the Russian pianist reveals an organ master strongly attached to the musical forms inherited from J.S. Bach: the prelude, the fugue, and the chorale. Translated to the piano keyboard, Franck's music, with its expansively conceived structures, requires a completely fresh approach that puts the greatest performers to the test: here, Lugansky took on an additional challenge by preparing his own transcription (a brilliant one, at that!) of Franck's celebrated Choral pour grand orgue No.2.

The Story of Dutch baroque music is a story of cultural connections, of European history. There was not a shortage of music, including repertoire for recorder, in Holland: Amsterdam was not only a center of composition and instrument making, but also one of the most important centers for music publishing. Many of the most esteemed Italian composers had their work published in Amsterdam, making it available there earlier there than in their own country. Dutch composers as well as musicians of the time were thus ironically more ‘close to the source’ than many of their Italian colleagues. The music that was written by Dutch composers was heavily influenced by the Italian style.

From 1739 onward, the publication of the Clavier-Übung III, that imposing corpus essentially focused on the Art of the Chorale heightened to the furthest-developed and most consummate potentiality of the genre, marked a decisive turning point and a change of perspective in Johann Sebastian Bach’s creative process. His music for organ, gradually unmoored from the sole liturgical functionality, henceforth responds more to an inner necessity and within a most perfect balance conjugates ars and scientia. This programme offers an immersion into the heart of these ten last years in the life of Bach that Gilles Cantagrel so appropriately calls the testamentary decade.

The starting point for our attention here is the work of the Spanish composer, guitarist and guitar teacher Francisco Tarrega ( 1852-1909), whose "school" influenced numerous Spanish composers who, like Tarrega himself, saw the guitar as Spain's national instrument. The 19th century was a time when large concert halls were being constructed, something which, as the guitar began to enjoy increasing popularity, became rather problematic for guitarists, particularly as far as the acoustics were concerned. It was the Spanish guitar maker Antonio Torres ( 1817-1892) who, basing his designs on those of previous guitar makers, combined with the most up-to-date research into acoustics, developed larger instruments, something which Tarrega found vitally interesting, so much so that he developed a new playing technique. Through the evolution of his style of legato fretting and his own particular perception of the diverse timbral possibilities of the guitar, Tarrega created sounds that virtually made the in-strument sing.