The most complete collection available of music by the father of Czech nationalism in music. Má Vlast, The Bartered Bride and the String Quartet ‘From My Life’: all written within a decade of each other, all so fundamental in their different genres in forming a Czech national identity in music that it can seem incredible they were the work of a single composer.

Pianist Sophia Weidemann and actress Tinka Kleffner present a musical-literary encounter with the exceptional composer Fanny Hensel in their new GENUIN album, "Das Jahr" (The Year). The album includes a remarkable piano cycle along with letters and diary entries to and by Hensel. Through their interpretation, these two highly acclaimed artists offer a high-level, intimate glimpse into the life and work of one of the most significant 19th-century female composers and enlightened thinkers, Fanny Hensel. Hensel's piano cycle covers a whole year, and the chosen and thoughtfully read excerpts mirror the emotionally rich and skillfully constructed music in the most delightful way!

For nearly 74 years from the death of J.S. Bach in 1750 to Mendelssohn’s fifteenth birthday in 1824 the Matthäus Passion had all but disappeared. Young Mendelssohn’s prized birthday gift - a bespoke a copy of the Passion - was to change music history when five years later he mounted its first performance in the nineteenth century in Berlin. Today it is inconceivable to imagine music without Bach, but in the 1820s his music had been relegated to no more than the exercise-book for students of counterpoint.

Édouard Lassen never stopped composing. His copious oeuvre contains examples of almost every genre in favour in the second half of the 19th century, from piano pieces to operas, choral works, symphonic and concertante pieces. His international reputation was secured especially by his theatrical works. He also produced a regular and uninterrupted flow of over 260 songs from 1857 until his death in 1904. The small-scale song form was ideally suited to his temperament imbued with universalism, assuming a dual cultural heritage.

Michael Spyres is a singer who challenges and reshapes perceptions – as his albums BariTenor and Contra-Tenor have shown. Now, preparing for his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Summer 2024, he searches In the Shadows to reveal more about Wagner and the origins of his music dramas. “Wagner evokes a varying spectrum of emotions – awe, ecstasy, even trepidation,” explains Spyres. “This album endeavours to illuminate the composers who languish in the shadows, who formed the foundation of Wagner’s compositions and sculpted the framework of vocal writing for the Wagnerian tenor.” In the Shadows culminates with three arias by Wagner – from Lohengrin and the lesser-known Die Feen and Rienzi. Preceding them are early-19th-century arias by composers of the French, German and Italian schools: Méhul, Beethoven, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Weber, Auber, Spontini, Bellini and Marschner. Spyres’s distinguished companions in his exploration are the players of Les Talens Lyriques and their conductor Christophe Rousset.

The Monteverdi Choir excels during the a capella selections (Opus 42 and 104) due to their precision tuning and group sensitivity. Brahms's deep, romantic textures and mounds of sound are most vividly experienced when no instruments join in the blend. But in the accompanied pieces (Opus 92, 17, and the Liebeslieder Waltzes, Opus 52), the chorus sounds mechanical, metronomic. The Waltzes are pleasant, but the group can't find a personal identity to enliven the expressiveness of the material; they are simply a poetic mural. Still, this disk, chock full of music, is a lot of worthwhile Brahms for your bucks.

During the period of lockdown in 2020, tenor Alessandro Fisher and his wife spent many hours in their garden. A heightened awareness of the beauty of nature, the flowers in their garden and the changes to the garden as winter moved to spring, and then to summer formed the basis of this beautifully curated recital.

Inspired by the Romantic storyteller E. T. A. Hoffmann’s eccentric alter ego, Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana is a work Hélène Grimaud has known since she was a teenager and has recorded once before – yet, as she says, “you can spend a lifetime with a piece like this and always find something new”. In revisiting it here, she’s paired it with two pieces by Schumann’s protégé, Johannes Brahms, including a set of songs in which Brahms distilled his unrequited love for Schumann’s widow Clara, and for which Grimaud is partnered by sensational young baritone Konstantin Krimmel. The Extended Edition of her album For Clara complements pianist Hélène Grimaud’s recording of Schumann’s Kreisleriana and Brahm’s Op. 117 Intermezzi and Op. 32 songs with a recording of her 2022 performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto with the Camerata Salzburg at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. The second movement, which is now available, gives a first impression of Hélène Grimaud performing one of the most widely recorded piano concertos from the Romantic period.

Parsifal (WWV 111) is a music drama in three acts by the German composer Richard Wagner and his last composition. Wagner's own libretto for the work is freely based on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by the 12th-century trouvère Chrétien de Troyes, recounting different accounts of the story of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his spiritual quest for the Holy Grail.

Soli Deo Gloria is proud to release the last instalment of its successful Brahms Symphony series which sees John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique explore the music of Johannes Brahms. This album is a celebration of the Fourth Symphony and the various pieces that contributed to its making.

Soli Deo Gloria is proud to release the third instalment in the successful Brahms Symphony series which sees John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique explore the music of Johannes Brahms.

For this recording of Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder, Joyce DiDonato is joined by the original instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro and Maxim Emelyanychev. "Bring that innocent, childlike sense of wonder to your craft, and do whatever you need to find that truth again. It will continually teach you how to be present, how to be alive, and how to let go. Therein lies not only your artistic freedom, but your personal freedom as well!"

A few years after the success of her album crossing Baroque music with folk, Love I Obey (ALPHA538), the Franco-American singer Rosemary Standley visits Schubert, this time with the complicity of the Ensemble Contraste: ‘We all have a few notes of Schubert buried deep inside us’ say the artists, who have got together around his music and brought to it an original sound texture, the result of their varied influences – classical, pop, jazz, folk.

The ultimate song cycle performed by two of today’s foremost lieder interpreters; this release is destined to become the reference recording for anyone interested in the great German song tradition.

Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir in a luminous, expansive performance of Brahms' German Requiem recorded live in 2009, during Nézet-Séguin's first season as the orchestra's principal guest conductor. The conductor's conception is notable for creating a sense of breadth and serenity while maintaining a purposefulness and momentum that never allow the long lines to sag; it's a beautifully executed balancing act that allows the work to unfold with the spaciousness and grandeur it needs to make its maximum impact.