Orchestral & Symphonic

The Finnish artist Christoffer Sundqvist is one of the leading clarinetists of his generation, and we are very happy to have won him for our complete edition of Louis Spohr's works for clarinet and orchestra (partly first recordings!). Not only the...

The finest string quartet, unquestionably, that our century has known." In 1951, when the Quartetto Italiano first visited the USA, composer Virgil Thomson's was enthused: "Perfection is the only word to describe this playing." The quartet's members, who...

The final volume of the complete Sibelius Symphonies from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Owain Arwel Hughes contains the ever popular 5th coupled with the beautiful less well known 6th, and the ground breaking single movement 7th, the composer's...

The final volume in James Ehnes and Andrew Armstrong's complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas series pairs the dramatic Sonata No.7 of 1802 with the serene Sonata No.10, composed in 1812 for the great violinist Pierre Rode.1. Beethoven: Violin Sonata No. 7 in...

The figures of Auguste Dupont and Peter Benoit may be little known outside their native Belgium, yet both enjoyed pianistic and pedagogical success in their lifetimes. Benoit's symphonic poem is a piano concerto in all but name, ending with a spiritedly...

The Fifth is a cursed work. Nobody understands it. (Gustav Mahler) The year 1901, when Mahler drafted the first sketches of the Fifth Symphony, mark the beginning of his "middle" phase, dominated above all by the three purely instrumental Symphonies nos...

The familiar in a new guise - Tatjana Masurenko and the Yaruss Quartet are therefore in good company when they clothe the music of the Russian Romantics in novel acoustic garments. Using viola, soprano domra and alto domra, accordion and double bass,...

The fact that music has a communicative power has been known for a long time by it's creators and performers. It has also often been used to emotionally move the listeners, to convey to them the values supporting the attitudes promoted in society:...

The fact that Geno?l von Lilienstern's childhood falls in the 1980s is proven by his portrait album in many ways: On the one hand, it is synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 that shape the aesthetics and sound of his works; on the other hand, the radio,...

The extreme social trauma that followed The Great War of 1914-18 engulfed Europe. In this context, English composer Frank Bridge is an intriguing figure. While his musical language transformed to embrace a radically new harmonic style, his popularity...

The expressive extremity of the music and the notoriety of the life seem inextricably bound together where Gesualdo is concerned. Here, his Maundy Thursday Tenebrae Responsories provide the climax of a program which opens with an astonishingly fine...

The exploration of Beethoven's piano works still continues to astonish me," wrote the Viennese pianist Rudolf Buchbinder in 2014, introducing his book Mein Beethoven: Leben mit dem Meister. "Even pieces that I have performed hundreds of times never lose...