Jinju Gwigeolireul Han Sonyeo

This Deutsche Grammophon release captures an exceptional group of live performances from New York's Alice Tully Hall in early 2015. It was recorded well, mastered, and, remarkably, on sale by the end of April of that year. That's what the old major labels need more of: the agility to spot something good that's happening and follow through on it. The listener's eye may be drawn first to the name of Mahler on an album of piano quartets.

Schubert’s two Piano Trios are amongst his greatest works, contrasted both within themselves and between each other although written within weeks of each other. The B flat has a superficially contented character at the start, but even here clouds seem to come across the sky at increasingly frequent intervals. The E flat is a more obviously dramatic work throughout, and the curiously ambiguous march of the slow movement is surely some of the most inspired music Schubert ever wrote.

Young cellist Han-Na Chang, Korean-born and trained in the U.S. by Mstislav Rostropovich, is a newcomer to Baroque music, having released a mixture of cello classics and late-Romantic and contemporary concertos up to this time. Here she delivers a set of seven Vivaldi cello concertos that Rostropovich himself might have helped her shape; it's something of a throwback to the way Vivaldi was played 30 or 40 years ago.