David Lacapelle

After their acclaimed recording of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, La Nuova Musica and David Bates expand their PENTATONE discography with Handel’s Unsung Heroes, in which the instrumentalists of Handel’s operas are put centre stage. Traditionally restricted to an “invisible” existence in the orchestra pit, La Nuova Musica’s obbligato instrumentalists – violinist Thomas Gould, oboist Leo Duarte and bassoonist Joe Qiu – are now in the limelight. They will stand as equal partners alongside a world-class line up of soloists – soprano Lucy Crowe, mezzo-soprano Christine Rice and countertenor Iestyn Davies – showing how Handel wrote music as virtuosic and lyrical for his unsung heroes as for their singing counterparts. The album includes arias from Handel masterpieces such as Rinaldo, Giulio Cesare, Agrippina and Ariodante.

David Crosby's debut solo album was the second release in a trilogy of albums (the others being Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire and Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder) involving the indefinite aggregation of Bay Area friends and musical peers that informally christened itself the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. Everyone from the members of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane to Crosby's mates in CSNY, Neil Young and Graham Nash, dropped by the studio to make significant contributions to the proceedings. (Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzman, primarily, act as the ad hoc studio band, with other notables adding bits of flavor to other individual tracks.)

Paul Juon was born in Moscow, of Swiss parents, in 1872, studying there with Arensky and Taneyev; Rachmaninov, a fellow student at the Moscow Conservatoire, dubbed him ‘the Russian Brahms’. Woldemar Bargiel, Clara Schumann’s half-brother, was his main teacher at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin before Juon himself became a member of the staff. There are indeed echoes of Brahms in Juon’s early music but there is also a fondness for Russian folksong and a mastery of counterpoint, which all feed into his urgent, late-Romantic lyricism.

Luck and Strange is David Gilmour's fifth solo record and only his third of the 21st century. The Pink Floyd guitarist clearly understands his life's privilege; he has made some of rock's most memorable music, toured its biggest stages, and been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He could easily coast along for the duration of his career. Instead, he has continued to tour, collaborated widely, advocated for numerous just causes, and donated the money from selling his home and guitars to charity. If he wants to make just one album per decade, he's earned the right. Appearing nine years after 2015's Rattle That Lock, Luck and Strange brings together a supporting cast that's both fresh and familiar, and also familial.