Linn And Records

Linn celebrates its 40th anniversary with a special double album bursting with stand-out music from across the decades. This compilation features specially designed artwork with an audiophile twist! Re-discover what makes this independent label great and enjoy the artistry for which it became famous.There is bestselling classical music from Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's Classical BRIT and double BBC award-winning album Mozart Symphonies 38-41, plus the Gramophone award-winning album from Dunedin Consort, the revelatory 1742 Dublin version of Handel's Messiah.

One of the UK’s leading collegiate choirs, The Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and its Precentor Matthew Martin make their debut on Linn. This new recording offers a fresh insight into the lives and works of two expatriate English Catholic composers exiled to Flanders at the time of the Reformation. Peter Philips and Richard Dering both travelled widely in Europe and their music displays a variety of religious and musical influences picked up along the way. The texts speak with a directness and intensity, deeply affected by this period of religious and artistic turbulence. As a celebrated choral composer in his own right, Matthew demonstrates a masterful grasp of these works, many of which receive their first recording here. The unique combination of instruments from the period instrument ensemble In Echo also serve to add intensity and colour to this most sophisticated music of the Late Renaissance.

Belgium's Lady Linn is a soulful vocalist with a bent toward jazz and R&B-infused electronic pop music. Born Lien De Greef in Sint-Amandsberg, Belgium in 1981, Lady Linn first became interested in music as a child listening to songs by Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Prince, and Led Zeppelin. At age eight, she began taking classical piano lessons and eventually earned a music degree, studying jazz at the Conservatory of Ghent. After graduating, she joined the dance-pop group Bolchi, with whom she scored the hit "City Trippin'" in 2004. The following year she appeared on the debut album from the hip-hop and R&B outfit Skeemz. In 2006 she debuted her own project, the multi-member jazz and funk-infused outfit Lady Linn and Her Magnificent Seven.

The ultimate song cycle performed by two of today’s foremost lieder interpreters; this release is destined to become the reference recording for anyone interested in the great German song tradition. Baritone Florian Boesch’s eagerly - awaited second album on Linn presents Robert Schumann’s bestloved song cycle, Dichterliebe, Op. 48: sixteen poetic gems by Heinrich Heine which reflect on a poet’s idea of love and loss. Treated on equal terms, the piano plays a decisive role, adding extra layers whilst emphasiz ing and enhancing the text. The lesser - known Zwölf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner complete the programme. This recording reunites the exceptional partnership of Florian Boesch and leading song pianist Malcolm Martineau, whose previous Linn recording, Schuman n & Mahler: Lieder, won the 2019 BBC Music Magazine Vocal Award. Surely the lieder recording highlight of the year!

Handel’s 1725 hit opera Rodelinda was written for the greatest voices of its day and is performed here by some of today’s finest, as The English Concert and artistic director Harry Bicket’s acclaimed concert cycle of Handel operas appears for the first time on Linn. Lucy Crowe and Iestyn Davies are the devoted partners Rodelinda and Bertarido, heading a cast packed with exactly the sort of vocal star-power Handel would have expected, including Joshua Ellicott, Tim Mead, Brandon Cedel and Jess Dandy. Both Davies and Crowe have won acclaim for their performances in these roles: BBC Music Magazine wrote, ‘Iestyn Davies stole the show with aria after aria of heavenly purity and ardour’, whilst BachTrack commented, ‘Lucy Crowe gave a brilliant performance … Her singing, firmly centred, agile and sparking with temperament, was a triumph.’ The English Concert’s reputation for combining urgency, passion and fire with precision, delicacy and beauty will ensure their forthcoming series of Handel operas will become an essential part of Linn’s catalogue. The English Concert will be recording Handel’s Tamerlano in 2021.

The Belgian Lady Linn is a jazz / pop singer, since 2004 accompanied by her musicians 'her Magnificent Seven'. In 2008 Lady Linn and her Magnificent Seven released her first album 'Here We Go Again'. With this album and accompanying singles she finally broke through in Flanders and scored several hits such as 'A Love Affair' and 'That's Alright', which made this album reach Platinum status.

Conceived by Jonathan Freeman-Attwood and Mozart scholar Timothy Jones, this programme of four sonatas "by" and "after" Mozart represents a belated apology to the composer on behalf of all trumpet players. Had the trumpet developed into a chromatic solo instrument in the 1770s and 80s – like the oboe or flute – Mozart might have been inspired to write great music for the instrument. Following eight recordings for Linn of similarly re-imagined trumpet and piano music from Monteverdi to Richard Strauss, this recital is a compelling new contribution to the trumpet repertoire with four Classical-style sonatas, drawing on varied styles and periods in Mozart’s music. It exhibits canvases from the Salzburgian church sonata to the strutting swagger of a 21-year-old pianist-composer in Munich and two large mid- and late-sonatas from the golden Viennese years. Accompanying Freeman-Attwood is the multi-award-winning Polish pianist Anna Szałucka.

This is the third and final instalment of the Well-Tempered Consort series (5 Diapasons, Gramophone Editor’s Choice, BBC Music Magazine Chamber Choice). In this programme devised by its director Laurence Dreyfus, the viol consort Phantasm continues to shine new light on the fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier interspersed with some of the composer’s most harmonically adventurous experiments from the Clavierübung III. This polyphonic feast also includes two works from the Inventions and Sinfonias as well as the Fantasia in G major BWV 572, or Pièce d’orgue as it is sometimes called, which boasts an extraordinary closing pedal point. A fitting end to a remarkable journey!