Cathy Jean Little Sick Twist

Woven around soul searching, cautionary tales and parables for modern life, the Freedom Fables is the most accomplished yet by the Leeds / London collective, effortlessly fusing different soul, jazz and global styles with great musicianship and lyrics.

Poetic music, musical poetry: The new Genuin album by internationally renowned pianist Cathy Krier from Luxembourg evokes the connections between sound and words, composers and language. Iconic repertoire pieces such as Maurice Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" and Franz Liszt's transcriptions of Schubert songs enchant us, alongside excerpts from Sergei Prokofiev's musical-choreographic fairy tale "Cinderella" and works by two successful contemporary female composers: Konstantia Gourzi and Catherine Kontz.

There is little in the way of a clear theme tying together this collection of Baroque works, which includes music by English and Italian composers, instrumental and vocal, secular and sacred, performed by the French group Ensemble Amarillis with soprano Patricia Petibon and tenor Jean-François Novelli. For the listener looking for a general assortment of pieces from the Baroque era, performed with lively energy, this could be just the thing. Outstanding are the vocal tracks featuring Petibon and Novelli. Petibon, whose jewel-like high soprano shines in the music of Purcell and Francesco Mancini, is a pleasure.

The beautifully played Sibelius recordings by conductor Leif Segerstam and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra have often been revelatory, not least in the much-neglected area of the composer's theater music. Segerstam found much of interest in the composer's incidental music, the forerunner of the soundtracks Sibelius might well have written if he had lived in our time. But Scaramouche, Op. 71, composed in 1913, is something else again: it is music for a pantomime, a genre not much in evidence for today (although it certainly has affinities with the music video). The action of the mostly wordless play (there were a few spoken passages, excised in this performance) was continuous, and so, thus, was Sibelius' music. It is thus a genuine piece of dramatic music, of which there is very little in the Sibelius catalog, and for the most part it has more to do with the developmental thinking of the symphonies than it does with the incidental music scores.