"Lava", "La Diva", "Bel Canto" - these are the names of some of Simone Kermes' highly praised and successful albums. Their new album "Inferno e Paradiso" is thematically about "Heaven and Hell" about "Virtues and Deadly Sins" - musically illustrated with 14 titles from four centuries from baroque to rock, from Bach to Sting, from Vivaldi to Led Zeppelin.

Some years ago Austrian radio ORF started a series of recordings with polyphony from the renaissance on its own label. The ensemble The Sound and the Fury has recorded music by well-known masters like Nicolas Gombert, Pierre de la Rue and Johannes Ockeghem. But they have also paid attention to some forgotten composers of the 15th century. One of them is Guillaume Faugues. As so often there is quite a difference between his reputation in his own time and in modern times. It is very likely nothing of his oeuvre has ever been recorded before.

In the third instalment in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of the secular cantatas with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy, come a quartet of works associated with the Venice-born maecenas Pietro Ottoboni – including the substantial Ero e Leandro, the libretto for which is plausibly considered to have been written by the Cardinal Ottoboni himself. As well as the seldom-performed cantata for bass, Spande ancora a mio dispetto and Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio scored forsoprano solo, Bonizzoni also directs the Spanish-texted Nose emendará jamás.

Neneh Cherry, the critically acclaimed singer/songwriter and "rapstress" who burst onto the scene in 1989 with the mega-hit "Buffalo Stance," did not even see the release of her third album, Man, in the United States. This set differs from her previous efforts in that there is absolutely no rap to be found anywhere on the disc, and all of the songs are slow-burning, midtempo alt-rock numbers, as opposed to anything remotely resembling dance or rap (though there are some hip-hop styled beats).

Between 1957 and 1968, Ray Conniff had 28 albums in the American Top 40. He started out at Columbia Records as their home arranger, backing artists such as Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, and Johnnie Ray, with his orchestra and was eventually offered the chance to do his own record. We Wish You a Merry Christmas is packed with traditional holiday tunes that Conniff and his (25) Singers wove into a series of medleys. This album has a retro studio sound, which, upon listening, may conjure up images of Lawrence Welk singers strolling the stage, dressed in matching holiday garb. Sometimes melodramatic ("Ring Christmas Bells"), other times, bright and exuberant ("Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!"), it's good, clean fun for the whole family and a solid addition to any Christmas catalog.

One Woman: The Ultimate Collection condenses Diana Ross' most successful recordings into one 20-song, 71-minute disc. Ross produced the album (which is to say picked the tracks), and included six of her Supremes recordings from the 1960s (one of them, "Someday We'll Be Together," in a new disco mix). She also licensed a few songs from her stay at RCA in the 1980s, making this one of the most wide-ranging of her compilations. She also includes four tracks from the 1990s. In other words, Ross has constructed the album as she might a concert – a sprinkling of early Supremes hits, all her biggest solo hits, and what she considers the highlights of her current work.

Hip-O's Ultimate Collection: The Complete Hits will likely be too much music for most audiences, simply because most listeners don't remember much more than "Love Will Keep Us Together," "Muskrat Love," and "Do That to Me One More Time" from Captain & Tennille. They actually had many more hits than that – 11 more, four of which hit the Top Ten, actually (for the record, they are "The Way I Want to Touch You," "Lonely Night (Angel Face)," "Shop Around," and "You Never Done It Like That"). All of them are here, along with several other singles and album tracks on this generous 22-track collection. To be frank, Captain & Tennille weren't quite varied or deep enough to make this collection not lose steam toward the middle, but the highlights – the three Neil Sedaka-penned tunes ("Love Will Keep Us Together," "Lonely Night (Angel Face)," "You Never Done It Like That,") plus "Do That to Me One More Time" – are all very good, standing proudly amongst soft rock hits of the time.

The second installment in Sakari Oramo's superb hybrid SACD cycle of the symphonies of Carl Nielsen on BIS presents the Symphony No. 1 in G minor and the Symphony No. 3, "Sinfonia espansiva," two ruggedly independent works that reflect the composer's late Romantic style yet point to the modernism to come. While the Symphony No. 1 was influenced by Brahms and offers a rich harmonic language, propulsive rhythms, and a fairly homogenous orchestral palette, the Symphony No. 3 is striking for its reliance on unfolding counterpoint and long-breathed lines, and most notable for the use of wordless parts for soprano and baritone voices in the pastoral slow movement. These performances by Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra are exceptional for their stunning power and spacious feeling, though the crisp details and focused sound quality will be the biggest draw for audiophiles.