Jeremy Rose & The Earshift Orchestra Disruption! The Voice of Drums

Nicola Benedetti’s new album on Decca Classics features premiere recordings of two works written especially for her by jazz musician Wynton Marsalis: Violin Concerto in D and Fiddle Dance Suite for Solo Violin.

To mark his debut on Deutsche Grammophon with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin pays tribute to his legendary predecessor on the podium, Leopold Stokowski. The transcriptions of Bach's organ music are among Stokowski's most celebrated achievements, and none is more famous than his expansive arrangement of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which was prominently featured in Walt Disney's Fantasia. It's a classic showpiece for the orchestra, as are Stokowski's fulsome orchestrations of the "Little" Fugue in G minor, and the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.

This is an excellent CD if you're into orchestrations of pop or rock music. Andrew Powell And The Philharmonic Orchestra do justice to some of The Alan Parsons Project's most recognizable songs, and did this before this became 'de rigeur' in the late 80's through now…

The oratorio "Der Kampf der Buße und Bekehrung" (the struggle for penance and conversion) is among Johann Michael Haydn's lesser-known works. The Purcell Choir together with the Orfeo Orchestra, under the direction of György Vashegyi now present a recording of the second and only surviving part of this three-part oratorio. It is impressive, especially for its unusual scoring: All of the the five solo roles are allotted to sopranos. The artistic mixture of majestic passages, surprising turns, Baroque rhetorical figures and virtuoso arias makes clear why later composers (e.g., Mozart, Schubert or Bruckner) repeatedly took Johann Michael Haydn's music as their model.

Pianist François-Xavier Poizat, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Simone Menezes, gives us a taste of the influences of jazz, Mozart and Saint-Saëns featured in Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, one of his last finished works.

For the latest instalment in their Mahler series, the Minnesota Orchestra under the direction of Osmo Vänskä presents what many consider to be the pinnacle of the Austrian composer’s entire work, the Ninth Symphony, his last completed symphony.

Blue Engine Records, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s in-house recording label, releases Sherman Irby’s Inferno by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis. Irby, the lead alto saxophonist of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, cleverly interprets Dante Alighieri’s epic poem from “The Divine Comedy” to create a sweeping work that takes listeners on a lyrically swinging tour of the underworld’s nine circles.

Vox is an Ann Arbor, MI-based early music ensemble that is performing a cappella Renaissance choral works in a part of the world where just recently they were hard to hear in person. Josquin and the Lost Generation is their debut recording. The disc contains an attractive and interesting program that does a fine job introducing audiences to the live stylistic issues of the early sixteenth century.

The new album "Oceanic" by Iveta Apkalna is a collection of two expansive organ works and two orchestral interludes with maritime connotations, showcasing Apkalna's special relationship with the sea as a musician who grew up on the Baltic. The album features Bernd Richard Deutsch's "Okeanos," which Iveta Apkalna describes as the best contemporary organ concerto. It also includes Maurice Ravel's "Une barque sur l'océan," a key work of musical Impressionism, and Jean Sibelius's "The Oceanides," a personal "Rondo of the Waves" along similar lines to Debussy's "La mer."