Bob Szajner Digital Ensemble Skater's Waltz 40

Born in London of Italian-French parents, Sir John Barbirolli (1899–1970) trained as a cellist and played in theatre and café orchestras before joining the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Sir Henry Wood in 1916.

The Philharmonia Hungarica was first established in Baden bei Wien near Vienna by Hungarian musicians who had fled their homeland after it was invaded by Soviet troops.

Rigorous repertoire is at the ready on WINDSWEPT VOL. II from Navona Records, a sweeping sonic force of contemporary chamber works for woodwind quintet.

December is a time of anticipation. We wait and we hope – veni, come! The songs on this album encompass many nuances and moods – from joy and jubilant celebration to deep melancholy and longing. They move between folk tunes, English carols and traditional Christmas songs from different times and parts of the world, between Bach and Ives, Bulgaria and Norway.

Holland Baroque presents Minne, an improvised programme inspired by the love poetry of medieval mystic Hadewijch from Brabant. Hadewijch was a 13th-century beguine who wrote an impressive oeuvre of love poetry, providing an original, female perspective on medieval life. For this project, Holland Baroque works together with Bastarda Trio, a folk-jazz group combining the unique sonorities of clarinet, cello and contrabass clarinet. Inspired by medieval poetry, the result is a playful, passionate, truly contemporary album.

For his fourth CD for Mirare, brilliant pianist and composer Matan Porat chose these colorful pieces, spanning through four centuries of music from Couperin to Adès, displaying the different and similar approaches of composers to dance. Through this program, which he dedicates to his daughter Zoe, he invites us to celebrate the colorful world of childhood and to discover new facets of his talent, both as a performer and as a composer.

Flowers we are …” brings together piano works by György Kurtág (born 1926) and György Ligeti (1923-2006), two of the most important and internationally successful composers of the post-war era who have one thing in common – Hungarian roots. The recording shows that the four-hand piano character piece also has musical significance and genre justification in contemporary music.

Nymphs is not just an invitation to embark on a journey into the wonderful world of the supernatural characters who populate French Baroque opera, it is also a trip through the history of the genre from around 1670 to 1750, in other words from the culmination of the Grand Siècle of Louis XIV to the full flowering of the Enlightenment under Louis XV.

Tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson has his own view of the biblical figure of Judas, who has imprinted himself in the collective memory of Christianity as the arch-villain. He wants to see him not only as the explicitly negative figure responsible for Jesus' death, but as someone who played his part in the inevitable path of sacrificing the Messiah and thus in the core of Christian doctrine. Kristjánsson also has his own view of Johann Sebastian Bach. For his picture of Judas, he has chosen arias and recitatives from his oeuvre.