On the Road 1982 features the band's tenth anniversary tour performance from The Hague, Netherlands. Unfortunately, as the liner notes explain, the original tapes were lost, and the recording presented here draws from the version that passed through the mixing desk. While the end result is still better than your garden-variety bootleg, the sound of the "Camel Live" ladle scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel is inescapable. Camel was promoting The Single Factor at the time (no wonder they called it the tenth anniversary tour), with a cast that bore little resemblance to any popular incarnation of the band.

Nagasawa delivers technically impressive and musically inspired interpretations. I am less enthusiastic about the orchestra whose playing I sometimes found rather dull, dynamically a bit flat and not very colourful. Even so, this disc deserves a positive reception because of the quality of the music and the performances by Masumi Nagasawa on a beautiful historical harp.

The Portuguese-Brazilian composer Marcos António Portugal (1762-1830) was best known in his day for his fifty or so operas, but he also composed a huge body of more than 160 religious choral works. The two here — in their first performances in modern times — illustrate his conservative Classical style as well as the operatic influences on his sacred music, but the absence of female voices from the chorus and violins from the orchestra bring an unexpectedly dark colour.

Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of Baroque music. Very little is known of his early years, where he studied and who taught him. Born in a village to the south of Prague, he later travelled to Dresden where he joined the court of the Elector of Saxony, Friedrich August I. His position at the court was a lowly one, but he nonetheless composed many works there and his output of church music was particularly prolific.

The Freedom Sessions is an album by Sarah McLachlan which was released on 6 December 1994 on Nettwerk in Canada and 28 March 1995 on Arista Records in the United States. The album consisted primarily of previously unreleased alternative versions and remixes of McLachlan recordings, plus a cover version of "Ol' 55" by Tom Waits. Many of the tracks were recorded during the same sessions as McLachlan's 1993 album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. In subsequent live performances, some of these songs (most notably "Ice Cream" and "Hold On") were reworked to match the style in which they were played on this album. The album was released in two versions: a standard CD, and an enhanced CD containing CD-ROM bonus material including interviews and music videos. The album was one of the first major enhanced CD releases.

In the wake of its first performance under his own direction in March 1904, Strauss struck a self-satisfied note: “Domestica has turned out a success, it sounds great, but it’s very difficult.” The extreme technical demands and the large resources required – the intimate details of the composer’s private life are translated into a monumental tone poem in his Sinfonia domestica. The Munich Philharmonic performs this opulent late-Romantic score in the Isarphilharmonie in Munich under its conductor emeritus, Zubin Mehta.

It wasn't so long ago that the only Sibelius quartet on disc was Voces intimae. Now the catalogue boasts no fewer than three accounts of the A minor, and the Voces intimae itself is available in five different versions. It is worth, perhaps, reminding you that before the Kullervo Symphony, Sibelius had hardly composed anything other than chamber music. After his breakthrough as an orchestral composer he continued to write music for domestic use, but into none of it did he pour ideas of any real significance or inspiration, with the sole exception of Voces intimae.

You might guess from the disc’s title (“Loneliness”), not to mention from the cover art, that isn't going to be the most cheerful of recitals; but in fact it isn't the least bit morose. Matthias Goerne has used his time with Harmonia Mundi to show that he is one of the most distinguished baritones singing Schubert today (review), and here he gives us his first Schumann recital, which proves to be every bit as distinguished; perhaps even more so, because since recording the Schubert series Goerne’s voice has darkened into an instrument that is even better suited for exploring the world of Schumann’s melancholy.

Chopin, Piano Concertos No. 1 and 2, performed by pianist Sa Chen and the Gulbenkian Orchestra Lisbon, Lawrence Foster, conductor (Pentatone Classics). Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra followers will remember Sa Chen from a year ago. In October 2007, she joined the orchestra for an unusual work, a piano concerto by Clara Schumann. Chen looks about 12 on her album cover here, but she's 29. She is a promising pianist.

This excellent disc brings together, as far as I know, all of Ravel's chamber music for the violin with various one-instrument accompaniment (and in the case of the sonata for violin and cello not merely accompaniment). It is, quite simply, a delight from beginning to end. To start with the shorter works, the Kaddisch and Berceuse are poignantly played and the Habanera is lightly and subtly varied in texture and color. Juillet's singing, smooth tone is as deliciously perfect as I could possibly imagine, and the playing is, even more importantly, exquisitely phrased.

Linn's Vivaldi: L'Amore per Elvira, featuring the English group La Serenissima under the direction of Adrian Chandler, has quite a bit to offer the Vivaldi fancier. First are Chandler's excellent reconstructions of two of the fragmentary "Graz" violin sonatas that have not come down with their continuo parts intact. Chandler has filled in the missing music with entirely satisfactory replacements that appear to be seamlessly Vivaldian, rendering these works into a listenable form for the first time.

The Brussels-based British composer Nigel Clarke is renowned for his virtuosic style, and an uncompromising contemporary musical language that speaks with an authentic voice to today’s audiences. This world premiere recording of his symphony for violin and orchestra The Prophecies of Merlin is inspired by the 12th-century text De gestis Britonum by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it casts the soloist as the maddened Merlin, either raging alone or caught up in the wild tumult of the orchestra. This score brims with rhythmic drive and bravura orchestration, juxtaposing savage musical outbursts with moments of sheer transcendental beauty.

In September 1925, seven students gathered in Brussels to form the first composers’ collective in Belgian music history – Les Synthetistes – who sought to distinguish themselves from late Romantic style by connecting with contemporary music. A lack of symphony orchestras in Belgium at the time saw them composing and transcribing original works for wind band, and through their collaboration with Arthur Prevost and the Band of the Belgian Guides, a unique canon of original, modern music could be heard on the Brussels concert stages during the interwar period. This recording provides a resounding response to the injustice of this repertoire’s complete neglect today.

Violinist Madeleine Mitchell has inspired new works from a variety of composers, many of whom share connections of various kinds. ‘Conversations’ sit at the heart of an album in which four pianist composers join Mitchell to perform their works. The music ranges from Alan Rawsthorne’s quicksilver 1958 Violin Sonata, heard here in a BBC broadcast to honour Mitchell’s two-decade partnership with the late Andrew Ball, to Thea Musgrave’s vivid Colloquy. The sequence of atmospheric, communicative pieces from contemporary composers explores natural phenomena, songs of freedom, telephonic frustration and a pas de deux love duet.