Speechless Hannah Harrington

Following their brilliant debut album in 2022, I'm Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me, singer Hannah Merrick and guitarist Craig Whittle embarked on a journey across America, traveling from Los Angeles to Boston, with stops in Texas and Nashville. In essence, this Liverpool-born duo has immersed themselves in the vast landscapes and cultural heart of America—the birthplace of blues, folk, and country, as well as urban rock—like shamans channeling the finest elements of the Great American Songbook.

This album, released by The Gustav Holst Society, with Albion Records, is in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst's birth on 21 September 1874. It is based on chamber works written or arranged for violin with either voice or another instrument, by Holst himself and four composers who were contemporary with him - with a focus on neglected works but including a new arrangement of one very popular piece. Distinguished violinist Hannah Roper is joined by Martin Jacoby at the piano, by soprano Emma Tring and by harpist Valeria Clarke.

Gioachino Rossini's opera L'Italiana in Algeri is one of the composer's best-known operas and has lost none of its rousing freshness and energy since its premiere in 1813. At the end of 2022, the young conductor Jakob Lehmann and his Eroica Berlin orchestra presented at the Delphi Theatre (Berlin) Rossini's music according to the latest knowledge of historical performance practice.

Hannah Mohan’s new album is a first in more ways than one. Time Is a Walnut is the first solo release from the Western Massachusetts singer and songwriter, after nearly a decade fronting indie-pop band And the Kids. The album also comes amid the longest stretch Mohan has spent in one place since she left home at 16 to hop freight trains and hitchhike across North America.

The sixteenth-century madrigal, a deceptively simple, whimsical poetic form of no fixed structure, had an elusive quality that was to prove inspirational to generations of musicians; madrigal settings came to form the core of many composers’ outputs and quickly evolved a musical identity independent of their poetic origins.

"If music be the food of love, play on" we read in Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night. Play on – but what music should we play? No playwright in world literature has inspired more musical settings by important composers over the centuries than Shakespeare. It is clear that music's role in Shakespeare's plays can hardly be overestimated. His stage directions call not only for song but also for instrumental sennets and tuckets – sonatas and toccatas. In this recording, Hannah Morrison, Marnix De Cat and the Hathor Consort bring to life a wealth of sensual Renaissance sounds from the time of Elizabeth I in pieces that could well have been performed at the Globe Theatre.