2020 |

2021 marks 100 years since the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the acknowledged masters of French music. Pianist Bertrand Chamayou, violinist Renaud Capuçon and cellist Edgar Moreau salute him with this album of three of his finest chamber works: the Violin Sonata No 1, Cello Sonata No 1 and Piano Trio No 2. “These are splendid works,” says Bertrand Chamayou, “but only relatively rarely performed and recorded. This is essential French Romantic chamber music and French performers of our generation have a duty to share it with audiences.”

The Choir of New College Oxford, one of the most acclaimed British choral ensembles, makes its Linn debut with a recording of works by the English Renaissance composer John Sheppard. New College Choir was already 150 years old when Sheppard arrived in Oxford intent on contributing to the wealth of choral polyphony that defined the era. Media vita is his most celebrated work, almost symphonic in its proportions, in which he combines and elevates conventional Tudor musical devices to striking effect.

Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet is the latest in Jonathan Freeman-Attwood’s imaginative series of musical reinventions for trumpet and piano. Works by Fux, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Bruckner, Webern and Zemlinsky complement the core work: a newly imagined Strauss trumpet sonata. Building on his highly successful transcriptions of sonatas by Fauré, Grieg, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Freeman-Attwood pushes the boundaries further delivering a fully realised trumpet sonata which Strauss did not write. This innovative approach embraces various levels of transcription, transformation, realignment and composition to create a significant new contribution to the trumpet repertoire, full of the gloriously idiomatic writing for which Strauss is renowned.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Tartini, Mario Brunello and the Accademia dell’Annunciata commemorate one of the great partnerships in the history of eighteenth-century music: the relationship between Tartini and Antonio Vandini, a cellist born in Bologna (cradle of the Italian cello school), active in Padua for fifty years, and the author of the first biography of Tartini, whom he had known since the 1720s. Coupled here for the first time are Tartini’s two cello concertos, probably intended for his friend and colleague, alongside the only surviving concerto by Vandini himself.

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.

A 17th Century manuscript that was compiled but Albert Bobowski, a Polish musician and orientalist, contains songs of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman court. Bobowski, alias Ali Ufki, was born around 1610 in Poland and worked in Constantinople at the Ottoman court where he was involved with many diplomats,clerics and travellers as translator, language teacher, mediator and adviser. Thanks to his diverse skills and profound knowledge of the Islamic-Ottoman and Christian-European cultures, he became a valued mediator between the two worlds during his lifetime. In this collection of European and Ottoman vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, court and popular music, Ali Ufki switches between languages and music genres with a fantastic ease and naturalness.

With new Eco friendly rechargeable batteries in his torch, and dry cleaned fedora upon his head, it's that time of year when good old Mr Stormy gives up his newly discovered treasures. A fourth year of treats unearthed from the murky, cavernous DGM archives. These have previously only been offered as MP3s, but now, for your delight and fetishization, they can be suffered in full FLAC quality. Take your time to enjoy yet another marvellous collection of newly polished gems!

‘Intense, emotional and pure’ is how Pavel Kolesnikov describes the experience of making this recording, the fruits of a collaboration between the pianist and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The spirit of the dance, so fundamental to Bach, is never far away in this compelling new account.