Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (b.1937) is an important contemporary voice in vocal music. In this new release, Silvestrov’s hauntingly beautiful vocal works are performed by the Latvian Radio Choir under their director Sigvards Kļava. During his artistic career, Silvestrov has explored a number of musical styles and techniques, such as avant-guard, post-modernism, neo-classicism, dodecaphony, aleatoric writing and pointillism. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, allowed Silvestrov to eventually compose spiritual works, inspired and influenced by his love of the Russian Orthodox Church music which Silvestrov imbues with his own unique sound and bursts of surprising harmonic moves. Silvestrov’s compositions are invested with the composer’s own unique personality, musical sensibility and sense of beauty.

Constance Demby is one of the few representatives of the New Age movement (in both her music and her personal philosophies) who consistently creates artistic, highly expressive compositions. Demby was trained in classical music as a child, and her artistic spirit led her to also master several other art forms; at the University of Michigan, she studied painting, sculpture, and music. It was her work as a sculptor that led her to new dimensions of sound. As she was torching a sheet of metal, it roared thunderously, and thus was born the Sonic Steel Instruments: the Whale Sail, and the Space Bass, enormous bowed instruments with deep archetypal resonances.

Story Teller and "Figuren am Horizont" are two recent concertos of German composer Johannes Kalitzke. In Story Teller highly acclaimed shooting star Johannes Moser becomes a narrator in a story based around a picture by fashion photographer Tim Walker. Each movement of Figuren am Horizont is an "obituary" dedicated to a lost friend of the composer.

2CELLOS return this autumn with an all-new album, Let There Be Cello, set for release October 19. A follow-up to the 2017 release of Score, Let There Be Cello finds Stjepan and Luka exploring a diverse catalogue with their signature boundary-breaking playing style.

When Alex Christensen published his ambitious project Classical 90s Dance in October 2017, he was sure of the curiosity of colleagues, fans and the media. As the most important German initiator of the techno, dance and eurodance movement, he initially worked as a DJ and composer, but quickly also as a producer of world fame.

Scottish composer James MacMillan is known for big public works, some of them inspired by his Catholic faith. But he is also the composer of a good deal of chamber music, largely avoiding the Scottish traditional influences present in his other work. Some is more abstract than his choral and orchestral pieces, although the String Quartet No. 2 ("Why is this night different?"), recorded here, is inspired by a Jewish Passover Seder observance. Chronologically that's the middle of the three works on the album; the earliest one, Visions of a November Spring, was one of the pieces that made MacMillan's reputation in the early 1990s, and it introduces the contrasts of light and dark that run through many of his works.

George Oakley is a Georgian-born American composer and a prize-winning concert pianist. The solo piano pieces on this recording, Toccata and Sonata-Fantasia, are technically demanding works which exhibit a range of styles from jazz to classical and Georgian folk music. Oakley’s Sonata for Cello and Piano takes us from an initial state of struggle and doubt to a cheerful and victorious conclusion. For his Four Songs on Shakespeare Sonnets, Oakley “drew inspiration… from the musical language of Shakespeare’s era, so that each song would somehow become a bridge connecting the Renaissance with modernity.” His mentor and friend Richard Danielpour has written that “George Oakley’s music is always highly expressive, inevitable without ever being predictable, and speaks to the heart as well as the mind.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner and MacArthur fellow John Harbison has composed a Requiem for our times- a moving choral work that incorporates the composer’s distinctive sensibilities while drawing deeply on the tradition of Latin sacred music. Completed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Harbison’s Requiem is full of dramatic passages from singers and musicians alike, with abundant opportunities for vocal soloists, brass and percussion to shine. “I wanted my piece to have a sense of the inexorability of the passage of time,” the composer says, “for good and ill, of the commonality of love and loss.” Giancarlo Guerrero is the six-time Grammy-winning music director of the Nashville Symphony, music director of the Wroclaw Philharmonic in Poland, and principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon, Portugal. A passionate proponent of new music, he has championed a number of America’s most respected composers through recordings, commissions, and eight world premieres with the Nashville Symphony, including the Grammy-winning recording of Michael Daugherty’s Tales of Hemingway.

A journey through countries, periods and styles on the theme of dance. The themes and melodies are borrowed from Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Italian, English, Hungarian and French composers, inspired by folk music and dances. Édouard Ferlet has used this music to compose new pieces, arranged for harpsichord and piano. There are no direct quotations here, rather a thread which is woven between these well-known melodies and a new musical vocabulary. In each piece Violaine Cochard and Edouard Ferlet improvise freely, each with their individual ‘temperament’ and sensibility. They work on sonority, texture, the exploration of sound palettes, specialization, phrasing, distillation. The two artists seek to develop sonic possibilities, articulations, playing techniques and interaction between their musical personalities. A special feature is their work on pulse and tempo, with compound meters linked with the rhythms of folksongs and dances, which are often in compound time. Each piece is underpinned by an individual dramaturgy; the melodies are immediately appealing because they remind us of something while surprising us with jazz and contemporary arrangements.

For his inaugural concert as the new Gewandhauskapellmeister, Andris Nelsons chose three pieces, each with symbolic power. At its center is the “Scottish” Symphony by Felix Mendelssohn, his most prominent predecessor, which was premiered by the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under the baton of the composer himself in 1842. The symphony is framed by a commissioned work by the Leipzig composer Steffen Schleiermacher and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, a key work of classical modernism. There is no question about it: this program defines his agenda. It professes Leipzig‘s rich musical tradition, spanning the period from the 19th to the 20th century, and to the music of our time.

Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz combines diverse materials in his music, ranging from elegies for the dead (Jewish as well as Arab, and American on September 11, 2001, as well as Middle Eastern), to fusions of Arab and Western materials, to high-spirited neo-classic fun. The mixture has appealed to cultural theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, who in the booklet to this Naxos release calls Fairouz's music "musical labor, seemingly effortless." The intent is to present Middle Eastern cultures not as exotic, and not as victimized, but as whole, complex entities showing musical influences from a variety of sources.

Although Dai Fujikura was born in Osaka, Japan, he has now spent more than 20 years in the UK where he studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin. During the last decade he has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Huddersfield Festival Young Composers Award and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in this country, Internationaler Wiener Composition Prize, the Paul Hindemith Prize in Austria and Germany respectively, and both the OTAKA and Akutagawa awards in 2009. Dai's music is inspired by the 'beauty, form and movement of swarms of fi sh and birds', and by the vivid colours and textures of sounds. This is explored in Secret Forest and Okeanos which which combines oboe, viola and clarinet with Japanese instruments. Dai's works are frequently performed to an international audience and he has recently collaborated on a new album with experimental musician and ex-Japan singer, David Sylvian.

This recording features one of today’s most sought-after conductors, Vladimir Jurowski, who was appointed Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, with many of his recordings on the LPO Label being chosen for special mentions by BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone Magazine. This recording of In lieblicher Bläue is taken from its world premiere performance at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on 14 March 2015. The recordings of Alleluia and The Stations of the Sun are also taken from live concert recordings at the Royal Festival Hall in March 2014 and December 2013 respectively. As Composer in Residence from 2010–14, Julian Anderson has a close affinity with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and this CD is a celebration of his time at the LPO. This is Julian’s second release on the LPO label, featuring premiere recordings of Alleluia and In lieblicher Bläue.

The bulk of this disc of music by Isabel Mundry is given to her seven-movement Dufay-Bearbeitungen (2003-2004) for chamber ensemble. These are more than just arrangements, though; Mundry takes the Dufay motets and puts them into a sonic context in which their ancientness is refracted through a thoroughly modern sensibility. She achieves this largely through instrumentation and by creating a mysterious aural environment in which the Dufay pieces play themselves out, and acquire new, illuminating emotional resonance.

Recorded in Fall 2017 at Studio PM in Montreal, INSCAPE is the work of an artist unconcerned with conventions, whose approach of neoclassicism is resolutely current. Produced by Alexandra Stréliski herself and Maxime Navert (who also co-produced Pianoscope), the attempt was to fill a certain emotional emptiness, a creative urge that commits to taking the listener back to a form of lost sincerity.