Linn 24 Bit

German baritone saxophonist and composer Kira Linn presents her latest work Illusion, alongside her six-piece band – the Linntett. The album moves in genres ranging from pop to jazz and indie to electro, neo-soul and R&B, played by three saxophones (Linn on baritone, Nino Wenger on alto and Christoper Kunz on tenor) as well as Rhodes (Lukas Großmann), electric bass (Lukas Keller) and drums (Johannes Koch).

Hailed as a “fascinating journey with music of timeless beauty”, Trio Mediæval’s highly acclaimed first album
“Words of the Angel” (2001) launched the group into the elite circles of early music ensembles and introduced them to a broad international audience. Formed in 1997, the Grammy nominated vocal ensemble consists of founder members Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Anna Maria Friman, and Jorunn Lovise Husan who joined the group in 2018.

After an acclaimed Respighi recording, Alessandro Crudele makes his second appearance on Linn, this time teaming up with violinist Michael Barenboim who makes his Linn debut, and the Philharmonia Orchestra. The programme offers a glimpse of two contrasting, yet defining figures of British music. Depicting an outsider within an isolated community – very much reflecting Britten’s situation at the time of its composition – Peter Grimes remains his most performed opera. Following its success, Britten extracted four ‘interludes’: brilliantly orchestrated portraits of the North Sea, performed here with Crudele’s distinctive mastery of orchestral colours.

The Choir of New College Oxford, one of the most acclaimed British choral ensembles, makes its Linn debut with a recording of works by the English Renaissance composer John Sheppard. New College Choir was already 150 years old when Sheppard arrived in Oxford intent on contributing to the wealth of choral polyphony that defined the era.

The exquisitely decorated 15th century choir book known as the Old Hall manuscript was lost to history for the best part of 400 years until its reappearance in a Catholic seminary at the end of the 19th century. The largest surviving collection of medieval motets and mass movements, it immediately became the most celebrated source of English music of the period. It was written in the first instance by a single scribe to ensure that the music of his fellow singers was not forgotten.

Pianist Malcolm Martineau is the brilliant initiator of this new one-of-a-kind series on Linn. The Brahms Songbook has set the unprecedented goal to record Brahms’s lieder by complete opus number. In this second instalment, Malcolm is joined by star mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and bass-baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann in five sets that were composed and published over a period of thirty years: Op. 72, Op. 105, Op. 43, Op. 48 and Op. 57. In a time when the middle-class was growing, song-writing was both lucrative and pleasurable, offering a myriad of ways to explore perennially popular topics like unrequited love. Yet, in the lieder recorded here Brahms immerses us in a heightened emotional world, distant from the drawing rooms and concert halls of the bourgeoisie.

Malcolm Martineau is the brilliant initiator of this new one-of-a-kind series on Linn. The Brahms Songbook has set the unprecedented goal to record Brahms’s lieder by complete opus number. For its first instalment, Martineau has teamed up with famed Dutch baritone Thomas Oliemans in the expansive Romanzen aus Magelone, Op. 33 . Composed between 1861 and 1869, the youthful, inevitably romantic fifteen-song cycle tells the story of a noble warrior, a Neapolitan princess and a sultan’s daughter.

In his Four-Part Consorts, John Jenkins (1592–1678) parades his much-vaunted contrapuntal prowess that is marked by a fanatical devotion to the equality of four independent parts. Frequently turbulent and given to frenetic activity, this music charts the interactions of a band of like-minded spirits obsessed with lively struggle and restless soul-searching. The incessant peregrinations of Jenkins’s roving harmonies are heady stuff and make moments of calm and valediction all the more deserved and poignant.

Following its acclaimed Linn debut recording, Copland & Chávez: Pan-American Reflections, The Orchestra of the Americas releases its sophomore album with its Music Director, Carlos Miguel Prieto. Prieto is joined by fellow Mexican and celebrated pianist Jorge Federico Osorio, who brings his superb musicianship, powerful technique, vibrant imagination and deep passion to this all-Spanish programme.

Following a highly anticipated televised performance at the 2023 BBC Proms, Dunedin Consort and its director John Butt now release Mozart's 'Great' Mass in C minor and Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach's Heilig ist Gott on Linn. Devised to celebrate his marriage to Constanze, but left unfinished at the composer's death, Mozart's Mass can clearly be traced back to the choral writing of Johann Sebastian Bach and his son, Carl Phillip Emmanuel.