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

Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra pay homage to Leonard Bernstein with a recording of Wonderful Town that captures the energy and excitement of sold-out performances from December 2017. Featuring an all-star cast led by Danielle de Niese and Alysha Umphress, this release coincides with worldwide #BernsteinAt100 celebrations marking the centenary of the Orchestra’s former President.

With Kempe at the helm we can be assured of elevated and noble performances. The BBC Legends issue captures him in two concerts given four months apart. The February 1976 concert was given at the Royal Festival Hall and gives us not unexpected fare – Berg – and decidedly unusual repertoire for Kempe in the form of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra. This positively crackles with rhythmic energy and dynamism, the strings responding with admirable precision and unanimity of attack. The result is a performance of real standing and a precious surviving example of Kempe’s small repertoire of British works.

Mozart’s “Idomeneo” is a lyrical tragedy and is considered Mozart’s greatest choral opera. It is composed in the baroque tradition of the opera seria; however, Mozart excels at giving it new traits and forms. He also exerted his influence on the dramaturgy, shortened parts to increase their effect, increased the suspense with a dense use of instruments and wrote the marvellous ballet music.

Best known for his tone poems, Frederick Delius began to write music in abstract forms later in life. The three concertos here were all composed between 1915 and 1920. They may be something of an acquired taste (like, indeed, most of Delius' music in general), but this is a superb rendering that never loses the thread of the long melodic lines the composer pursues here as possible outcomes of his wide palette of musical textures. There are certainly passages that sound as though they could have come from On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring or one of Delius' other popular tone poems, and in the Double Concerto especially there are hints of the African-American melodic influences Delius recalled from his time in Florida as a young man.

Very often interpreted in their original version for piano, the recording of the opera version of the Goyescas are rare and it fills a gap in the discography. Created in 1916 at MET New York, many scenes of this opera are directly inspired by Goya's paintings. A specialist in this repertoire, Spanish conductor Josep Pons has assembled a brilliant cast around the BBC orchestra.

Recorded live at the Barbican in London, these recordings represent the first complete CD cycle of Martinu’s symphonies conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek. The critically acclaimed concerts were given to mark the 50th anniversary of Martinu’s death in 1959.

This is the third volume in the Chandos series devoted to the music of the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski. It brings together his first surviving orchestral piece (The Symphonic Variations) and his last symphony, as well as two works for piano and orchestra – an early work originally written for two pianos (The ‘Paganini’ Variations), and his very last concerto. The works are performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Edward Gardner, described by Gramophone as a veritable ‘Dream Team’ in Vol. 1. They are joined in this recording by Louis Lortie, the award-winning pianist and exclusive Chandos artist.

The exclusive Chandos artist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is a master of this repertoire. This is his second concerto recording for the label, after his survey of the complete piano concertos by Bartók (CHAN10610) which was released in September to high acclaim and voted ‘Orchestral Choice of the Month’ by the magazine BBC Music. Bavouzet’s complete recording of the piano music by Debussy also scooped awards from BBC Music and Gramophone, which wrote: ‘This could well be the finest and most challenging of all Debussy piano cycles.’ On this new release, Bavouzet is accompanied by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Yan Pascal Tortelier, a conductor steeped in the French tradition and utterly at home in this repertoire. The result is a totally idiomatic performance of these French masterpieces for piano and orchestra.

The idea of John Eliot Gardiner not only doing Holst's The Planets, but doing it so effectively, shouldn't have come as a surprise, considering his broad musical culture and the success he has always had with large-scale works. His interpretation is quite reminiscent of Sir Adrian Boult's mid-'60s account with the same orchestra (then called the New Philharmonia)–tasteful yet full of character, impeccably played, energetic, fresh. On top of that, the recording is breathtaking. There is extraordinary inner detail, with string tone that is natural (as is the timbre of winds and high percussion) and an astonishing amount of weight in the bass. The coupling, Percy Grainger's The Warriors, is a wonderfully erudite touch–just what we should expect from Gardiner–and a romp for him and the orchestra.