Dana Gillespie first made her name as a teenage singer (and songwriter) in the 1960s, with a string of memorable singles and albums for Pye and Decca.

Blue Note will issue a never-before-released studio album by Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, Just Coolin’, on 17 July. It was recorded on 8 March 1959 in the Hackensack, New Jersey studio of feted recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder.

"I spent a lot of time thinking why Alessandro Rossi called his record Emancipation. It’s a very intriguing word. It’s different to “liberty”, it’s different to “freedom”. The latter concept has, obviously, an important role in contemporary music, even if there’s little sensible discussion of what it actually means. Emancipation, though, isn’t so much a thing or a property, as an act or a moment…

Franz Liszt composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E♭ major, S.124 over a 26-year period; the main themes date from 1830, while the final version is dated 1849. The concerto consists of four movements and lasts approximately 20 minutes. It premiered in Weimar on February 17, 1855, with Liszt at the piano and Hector Berlioz conducting.

This third instalment in Brilliant Classics’ French Cello Sonatas series features the phenomenal composer Louise Farrenc (1804–1875), who is enjoying a much deserved revival amid contemporary focus on women composers, and the enigmatic and formidable Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888), renowned for his complex compositional language and extreme piano virtuosity.

William Byrd (c.1540–1623) was an English composer who wrote in every genre prevalent in his day and displayed proficiency in each musical category he attempted. Whether it was sacred or secular vocal music, his consort writing for viols, or his music for the keyboard, Byrd was a supreme musical architect. His writing reached the height of musical sophistication in England during his lifetime.

Until 20 years ago, the figure of Antonio Salieri seemed destined to remain under a cloud of widespread disrepute, in the shadow of his complex relationship with Mozart and unsubstantiated criminal allegations that have come down to us through a thread that runs from Aleksandr Pushkin’s poetic drama Mozart and Salieri (1830), later set to music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1897), to Miloš Forman’s famous film Amadeus (1984). In reality, Salieri, in late 18th-century Vienna, enjoyed a stature that Wolfgang could only dream of: court composer, conductor of the Italian opera and, above all, maestro di cappella of the imperial court – in other words organiser and manager of the Hapsburgs’ entire musical life.