2019

After 4 years of work on their 11th release for ReR, this extraordinary, reclusive, and highly individual audio-visual collective continues to evolve through the painstaking accumulation and disposition of a seemingly incompatible range of both exotic and familiar musical languages, instruments, techniques and studio manipulations into one of the few genuinely original bands at work today. It took a long time to refine their unique process of composition to this level of ambiguity and depth and newcomers will wonder how they strayed so far from orthodoxy and yet managed to retain a lucidity and transparency that is quite rare in contemporary music.

A Bath Full of Ecstasy is a fresh, invigorating and essential new chapter in Hot Chip's career, taking in their huge breadth of influence and melody as only Hot Chip can. You can hear the pleasure the band had in creating this album and they want to pass on that feeling to the listener. It is time to get lost in A Bath Full of Ecstasy.

Vivaldi, the Venetian: master of the whole palette of human emotions. From the church to the opera house, from tragedy to joy, the immediately recognizable sensibility, the expressiveness, the inimitable colors and an unbeatable talent to say so much in just a few notes. The contralto Delphine Galou (who recently won a Gramophone Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the classical music world) and Ottavio Dantone's Accademia Bizantina have created two recitals of sacred music and of opera that illustrate the incomparable richness of Vivaldi’s body of work and establish the emotional connections between the two repertoires.

Alba's album Brahms IV Segerstam concludes the series of symphonies by Johannes Brahms and Leif Segerstam. The last album of the four-part series includes Brahms' fourth symphony and the symphony number 295 composed by Segerstam in memory of conductor Ulf Söderblom. In his symphony "ulFSöDErBlom in Memoriam …" Segerstam plays with the name of the conductor, which includes the notes F, S, D, E and B. Brahms' fourth symphony was his last, and according to Segerstam, "the beginning of the symphony can be used to explain how music is born."

A groundbreaking collection of studies by one of the 19th century’s leading keyboard lions. By the early 1830s, the celebrated virtuoso Friedrich Wilhelm Michael Kalkbrenner was at the height of his pianistic powers. It was at this time that Chopin moved to Paris and found Kalkbrenner to be the finest pianist he had heard: ‘Herz, Liszt and Hiller are all zeros next to Kalkbrenner.’

The members of Cinquecento turn to perhaps the pre-eminent composer of the sixteenth century: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah would have been integral to the liturgical rites of Holy Week: here is one of the most sublime.

Karajan was a great Tchaikovsky conductor. Although he recorded the last three symphonies many times he did not turn to the first three until the end of the 1970s. There’s no doubt that the reason these early symphonies sound so fresh is because the Berlin orchestra was not over-familiar with them. The Tchaikovsky symphonies were recorded at the Philharmonie between October 1975 and February 1979 and are presented with their Slavonic March and the Capriccio Italien, both recorded in Jesus-Christus-Kirche in October 1966. The six symphonies span the whole of Tchaikovsky’s career as a composer, from 1866 until 1893, the year of his death.

The music of the Renaissance appears to reflect little of the dangers, horrors and violent conflicts of its time. Music written during the Hundred Years War or the French invasion of Italy gives hardly any impression to today’s ears of the precariousness of existence of which its composers, singers and listeners must have continually been aware. Nor do the two masses by Jacob Obrecht (1457/8 – 1505) on this recording betray anything of the restless spirit of the age, despite them both being based on models referring to suffering and misery.