American tenor Rockwell Blake in this pyrotechnical recital conducted by Patrick Fournillier performs hits from the French repertoire by Bizet or Donizetti, and rare pieces by Adam, Auber or Boieldieu. This album includes the often-dismissed aria from Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice “L’espoir renaît en mon âme”. At the time of this recording, Blake was at his prime in the 80s and the 90s one of the most sought-after performers of classical and early Romantic operas being gifted with an incredibly agile voice.

Henry Mancini Centennial is a celebration of the legendary Film Composer’s music on his 100th Anniversary. Featuring José María Moreno conducting Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga on the IBS Classical label.

This sequence of Wagner’s preludes and overtures ranges across his compositional output, from Rienzi, his first distinctive opera, through the stirring Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, to his last work, Parsifal from which we hear the Good Friday Music. They are performed by the St. Louis Symphony under the Polish conductor Jerzy Semkow who was the orchestra’s music director from 1975 to 1979.

As a composer of sacred music, Bob Chilcott has found his own niche by writing accessible choral works that speak to contemporary sensibilities. As has been noted frequently, his Requiem evokes Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé, mostly through its gentle feeling and serene melodies, though without imitating their style or content. Rather, it has its own mix of somber harmonies and fluid, chantlike lines, and the expression of the work is a little cooler and darker. Chilcott's music admits occasional and mild dissonance, though the orientation is strongly modal and the harmonies always feel like a natural result of the counterpoint. Chilcott's Salisbury Motets, Downing Service, and three shorter pieces share the same modern Anglican style, which is approachable and easy to follow. The Wells Cathedral Choir, under the direction of Matthew Owens, sings with a pure tone and clear diction, and the sound of the recordings is quite resonant, thanks to the responsive acoustics of the Cathedral of St. Andrew.

In 1991 lutenist Jakob Lindberg bought a very special instrument – one of the rare extant lutes by Sixtus Rauwolf, built c. 1590. The restoration of the lute took several years and was rather painstaking: for some repairs they even used ancient wood from the library in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Considering the great age of the instrument it was nevertheless in good shape and is now probably the only one in the world that, retaining its original soundboard, is in playable condition.

Jiří Bělohlávek and the Czech Philharmonic present Leoš Janáček’s most notable works. This release continues the series of Jiří Bělohlávek’s last recordings of Czech masterworks for Decca Classics before he sadly passed away last year. August 2018 marks 90 years since Janáček’s death in 1928. This album commemorates the great Czech composer with these informed recordings by the Czech conductor and orchestra.

A remake of a special kind. 2024 marks 150 years since the premiere of „Pictures at an Exhibition“. On this anniversary the quartet now presents an extraordinary and progressive interpretation of this timeless masterpiece by Mussorgsky, having always explored innovative possibilities to transform the different genres of classical music, The Modern String Quartet hereby exhibits pictures within the framework of a fascinating contemporary tonal language— so very abstract and modern. A crouched Gnomus scurries through the disharmonious paint blobs of a Jackson Pollock, Baba Jaga skitters through the wild, expressionistic brush strokes of a Wassily Kandinsky. New pictures are hung up, being uncompromising in expression and enhanced by unrestrained imagination.

Erato brings you an album now available for digital formats featuring Busoni's 'Arlecchino' and Puccini's 'Turandot'. Despite Busoni's short opera being overshadowed by Puccini's masterpiece, Kent Nagano give a splendid rendition of the two works and showcases their musical qualities with a stellar opera vocal cast; Susanne Mentzer, Philippe Huttenlocher and more!

The Alhambra Palace was built in the early Middle Ages, in the city of Granada, following the Arab conquest of Spain. With its impressive mosaics and sun-drenched gardens, it inspired the creation of many wonderful compositions throughout the centuries. While several works of Francisco Tárrega, Isaac Albéniz and Joaquín Turina have a direct connection to the Alhambra Palace, the Arabian influence is evident in most pieces on this Album.

With this fiery version of Schumann’s piano concerto, the discography of the amazing Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund is now fully available digitally! It is coupled with other masterpieces of the concertante repertoire, including Grieg the quite rare Glazunov, and performed with undisputable mastery by genius soloist John Ogdon.

Erato brings you perhaps The Boston Camerata's most ambitious programs. Joel Cohen and his ensemble recreated 'Tristan & Iseult ' the legend of the most famous and tragic love story of the whole Western culture by mixing captivating recitations of the earliest German and French written sources with love songs from 12th and 13th centuries’ troubadours and adaptations of pieces excerpted from the famous Vienna manuscript. Now available on digital platforms, this album was an absolute hit of Medieval music at the time of its release and won unnumberable prizes. It was dedicated to the memory of star counter-tenor Henri Ledroit, who portrays Tristan.

Alberto Ginastera left his massive orchestral piece Popol Vuh, which had been commissioned by Eugene Ormandy, unfinished at his death in 1983, and it was only after it was discovered by pianist Barbara Nissman that it had its premiere in 1989, with Leonard Slatkin and Saint Louis Symphony. A musical reimagining of Mayan creation mythology, it's a monumental piece that viscerally evokes a primitive world using both folk elements and sophisticated modernist techniques. The composer wrote that he was aiming for a "reconstitution of the transcendental aspect of the ancient pre-Columbian world," and the piece is fully successful at capturing that vision with music that is powerfully primal, strange, and darkly beautiful.

Much of the solo literature for double bass requires the instrument to change its tuning from its standard orchestral arrangement, raising the pitch of each string by a whole step (if not more) in an attempt to increase its clarity, projection, nimbleness. This Neos album, Music for Double Bass with German bassist Frank Reinecke, steers away from works that employ scordatura in favor of those that use the typical orchestral tuning on the bass. The idea: to focus on and explore the depth and resonance for which the instrument was constructed.