Albert Sammons, Peers Coetmore, Bbc Symphony Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult Moeran: Symphony

Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear, in a seminal year approaching his debut at the BBC proms, presents his new album of works by Sergei Prokofiev, alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Litton. Proclaimed "a phenomenon" by the Los Angeles Times and "one of the best pianists of his generation" by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stewart Goodyear has carved out a formidable international reputation as both concert pianist and composer, with an impressive catalogue of recorded repertoire to date.

The BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Oramo with an exceptional quartet of soloists give a vivid and heartfelt interpretation of Smyth’s earliest large-scale choral work. Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, DBE was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalized as a ‘woman composer’, as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream, yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticized for not measuring up to the standard of her male competitors.

Bella Davidovich (born in 1928) won the prestigious Warsaw International Chopin Competition in 1949, sharing first prize with pianist Halina Czerny-Stefanska. This is a rare recording of Chopin's two Piano concertos, with a warm sense of music. The piano has a weak presence, as if Chopin himself were playing. The London Symphony Orchestra, under Sir Neville Marriner, is not only an accompanist, but it has a full powerful presence. Enjoy this jewel!

This collection of vocal and orchestral works by Benjamin Britten span his career, from Two Portraits for string orchestra, written when he was 16, to the solo cantata, Phaedra, one of his last completed works. The music varies in style but even the earliest pieces sound mature and demonstrate the composer's early mastery of his craft. Phaedra, from 1975, sets a selection of monologues from Racine's play that outline the dilemma of the queen who falls in love with her husband's son from an earlier marriage.

Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) is one of the most underappreciated composers of the 20th century, whose music is only now, thanks primarily to this new series by Chandos, coming into major recognition. Gerhard's music transcends any easy categorizing. Suffice to say that it's a rigorous (almost radical) postmodernism that employs extreme musical textures and sonic embellishments of surprising complexity….. …This will knock your teeth out.

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Anna Clyne’s Masquerade was first heard at the 2013 Last Night of the Proms and, since then, a snippet has become familiar in Proms adverts across the BBC. Wildly exuberant, the piece suited its celebratory purpose to a T – and its live recording does likewise in opening this album of show-stopping orchestral works, written over a ten-year period.

This release is part of the complete cycle of Vaughan Williams' symphonies undertaken by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the energetic Martyn Brabbins holding the baton. Like others in the series, the reading of the Symphony No. 5 is a strong performance, understated in the English way, with themes arising naturally, as if organically. Listen to the emergence of the second theme in the opening movement for a good idea of what to expect from the whole. The big news here is the presence of a new Vaughan Williams work: the Scenes Adapted from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, composed in 1906.

Saluting an extraordinary composer-conductor relationship, this collection presents almost all Elgar's major orchestral works and the Sea Pictures in the classic recordings made by Sir John Barbirolli towards the end of his life. Barbirolli began as an orchestral cellist, and played under Elgar's baton in the première of the Cello Concerto. Encouraged by Elgar, he moved into conducting and made his mark with the composer's Second Symphony in 1927. Elgar's music was to remain a talisman for the rest of Barbirolli's life.

Sir Colin Davis, R.I.P., leads the London Orchestras (LSO–BBC) in performances given in February 1971 for the K.317 and 427, and in September 1967 for the K.626 Requiem. Both Helen Donth, soprano and tenor Ryland Davies sing in all here works and the choirs are the Alldis and LSO Chorus. Davis, of course, conducts the entire project in a raversal of the major liturgical works by the composer, for Philips.