Throughout its Golden Age, England cultivated the masque, an elite entertainment featuring dialogue, song, and dance. As part of these spectacles, courtiers—and at times even the queen herself—often graced the dance floor. But it was hired professionals who provided the musical heart of these productions. Lutenists in particular were especially adept at creating music for any occasion. The dances, variations on popular songs, and fantasias they composed are full of versatility and virtuosity. This recording features lute works by the foremost composers of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era, with music by Dowland, Holborne, Bacheler, Ferrabosco, and other contemporaries who participated in The Queenes Maskes. For many years Elisa La Marca has been much sought after by leading specialist ensembles (Il Giardino Armonico, Il Pomo d’Oro, Les Musiciens du Prince, Zefiro etc.), with which she appears in prestigious locations, the mostly recent being the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Here she presents her first solo album, devoted to one of her favourite repertoires.

Throughout his career, Ringo Starr has received nine Grammy® Awards and has twice been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - first as a Beatle and then as solo artist. Now, he releases a brand-new country music album, Look Up, produced and co-written by T Bone Burnett. This stunning collection features 11 original songs, recorded this year in Nashville and Los Angeles.

Emmanuel Pahud and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande begin this new album of compositions by Éric Montalbetti with his Flute Concerto Memento vivere, conceived in one movement as an ode to breath and life. Duncan Ward and the Gürzenich Orchester Köln have recorded the final and definitive version of Montalbetti’s Ouverture philharmonique, a mini-concerto for symphony orchestra that invites the listener to immerse themselves into the heart of each of the orchestra's sections, and to revel in the work’s multiple combinations of timbres. Finally, Kazuki Yamada and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo perform the composer’s great symphonic fantasy Éclair physionomique, inspired by Paul Klee’s fascinating painting Physiognomischer Blitz, a self-portrait of the artist illuminated by a flash of lightning. Each of these pieces unfolds like an extensive daydream, a journey across interior landscapes that the composer would like to share with the listener.

Jérémie Rhorer and Le Cercle de l'Harmonie launch a new collaboration with Alpha Classics, with several projects planned, following the Mozart operas released on the label in 2016 and 2017. Here they tackle a monument of the sacred repertoire that is fascinating for its rich, complex, even ‘mysterious’ conception. Rhorer tells us that his interpretation pays close attention to the question of tempi, which have often become progressively slower and heavier since the post-Romantic period: the tempi have ‘a direct bearing on the vocal comfort of the singers, since breath control is one of the great difficulties of this work’, he says. For this recording, he has called in a quartet of top-flight soloists along with the Audi Jugendchorakademie, a remarkable German youth choir founded in 2007. In conjunction with his period-instrument orchestra, soon to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, they offer a passionate vision of Beethoven’s masterpiece.

Una poesia muta: Art in early Cinquecento Venice is the result of a collaboration between SWR radio, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and The Marian Consort. Specially curated by the Stuttgart museum, Germany’s first ever exhibition devoted to Vittore Carpaccio and his contemporaries has inspired The Marian Consort to devise an album to accompany this artistic journey. Being one of the most prominent painters of the Early Renaissance in Venice, Carpaccio is likely to have been acquainted with the music and the composers recorded here, since all have strong links to the city at that time. If some of them are well-known today – Josquin, Jean Mouton, Adrian Willaert – others deserve wider recognition. The Marian Consort and its director Rory McCleery have assembled a typically fascinating programme, matched with superb singing.

Tippin’ is the realization of a dream I've nurtured for quite some time. It’s been over 20 years since I last recorded as a leader, not counting the two records I made with my dear friend and bassist, Rodney Whitaker, Get Ready and Work To Do.

Produced with Mark Ralph, who previously worked with them on their 2013 album Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action, the album showcases Franz at their most immediate, upbeat and life-affirming, unashamedly going for the pop-jugular in classic Franz style. Recorded at AYR studios in Scotland, the 11-songs on The Human Fear all allude to some deep-set human fears and how overcoming and accepting these fears drives and defines our lives.

Former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is not prolific. Rattle That Lock is only his fourth solo studio album (though it follows his late band's final album, The Endless River, by only ten months). Gilmour recorded some 35 songs for this set, some dating back 18 years. Trimming them to ten couldn't have been easy. Titled for John Milton's second book in Paradise Lost, Rattle That Lock is structured as an informal song cycle to reflect the sometimes random, sometimes weightier thought processes of a typical person in a single day. It begins, appropriately, with the instrumental "5 A.M.." Orchestrated by Zbigniew Preisner, Gilmour's signature slow, bluesy, Stratocaster sting enters just 30 seconds in, followed by fingerpicked acoustic guitars, gentle synths, and electric piano amid chamber strings to announce the title-track single.