Flac 96 24

A coming together of two artists with enormous followings – Valentina Lisitsa, with her dazzling artistry and hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube, and Michael Nyman, with his hugely popular film soundtracks. This release, in the year of Nyman’s 70th birthday, features tracks from his multi-award-winning score for the 1993 smash hit film The Piano.

The impact of Russian and Oriental culture on Ravel’s formative years retained a hold on him throughout his life. His colourfully re-orchestrated selections from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite ‘Antar’ and opera Mlada, with interpolations of his own music, as the incidental score for a theatre production are heard here in their première recording, revived and reconstructed alongside a new text that symbolizes the romance and chivalric spirit of Antar the warrior-poet and his beloved Abla. Ravel’s fascination with the exotic is brought together with Debussy’s influence in the ravishing and enduringly popular song cycle Shéhérazade

Chvrches return with the fourth album Screen Violence. Recorded remotely between Glasgow and Los Angeles during the pandemic, Screen Violence derives its title from one of the band’s early proposed names before they settled on Chvrches. A decade later, the band decided to revive the name in the midst of the Covid-19 lockdown, where many relationships were tethered together over the computer amid a global crisis. The album includes How Not to Drown which features Robert Smith from the Cure.