Rolando Villazón is an avowed Mozart fan and has celebrated the works of the great composer every year in Salzburg, among others, as director of the traditional Mozart Week since 2017. With the album “Mozartissimo” the tenor has now achieved a very personal homage to Mozart, because he has summarized his favorite arias on the album and convinces with charisma, voice and musical passion.

The Jazz Club series is an attractive addition to the Verve catalogue. With it's modern design and popular choice of repertoire, the Jazz Club is not only opened for Jazz fans, but for everyone that loves good music.
An acclaimed French pianist known for his jazz interpretations of classical works, Jacques Loussier rose to prominence leading his trio in the 1960s. A gifted classical musician in his youth, Loussier gravitated toward jazz and issued a series of innovative, genre-bending albums under the Play Bach title in which he reworked the music of Johanne Sebastian Bach…

Pianist soloist, chamber music player and accompanist of famous singers, Maciej Pikulski already appeared on the stage in 300 concert halls on 5 continents. He was awarded a piano, chamber music and vocal accompaniment diploma at the Paris Superior Conservatory. Then he was admitted to the post graduate cycle and became prize-winner of the France Telecom Foundation.

Elisaveta Blumina prefers playing character pieces. This may be because, even as a child, she was attracted to the ballet and her most fervent wish was to become a ballerina. This wish was never to be fulfilled (You are too tall, they said at the ballet school, but it had a significant impact in her understanding of music: Through the perception of dance, of movements and the characters involved, she can get a better feeling for the music. The fundamental reason for the choice of repertoire on this album was that the works by Scriabin, Prokofiev, Weinberg, Frid and Kancheli also, for her, represent a retrospective connection to her home country.

A solo revelation of the "Victories of classical music 2018", Sélim Mazari was one of Brigitte Engerer's last students, before working at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris with Claire Désert, then in London where he embarked on a second Master at Royal College.

This well-planned Naxos programme is carefully laid out in two parts, each of viol music interspersed with harpsichord and organ pieces and ending with an anthem. It gives collectors an admirable opportunity to sample, very inexpensively, the wider output of Thomas Tomkins, and outstandingly fine Elizabethan musician whose music is still too known. Though he is best known for hid magnificent church music, it is refreshing to discover what he could do with viols, experimenting with different combinations of sizes of instruments, usually writing with the polyphony subservient to expressive harmonic feeling, as in the splendid and touching Fantasia for six viols. Perhaps the most remarkable piece here is the Hexachord fantasia, where the scurrying part-writing ornaments a rising and falling six-note scale (hexachord). The two five-part verse anthems and Above the stars, which is in six parts, are accompanied by five viols, with a fine counter-tenor in Above the stars and a bass in Thou art my King.

Calvaire, Calvary - symbol of resignation and hope. Two expressive contemporary compositions illustrate and interpret the events of Golgotha and the associated extremes of human life and action in musical images. In their Calvaire settings, Helmut Vogel and Bjarne Hersbo tracked the phenomena of the coincidence of resignation and hope, space and time in their individual audio languages. Compositions of the late 19th and 20th centuries form contexts for the Calviare settings in their form and emotionality. Christoph Keggenhoff, organist at Speyer Cathedral for a long time, has expressive instruments available with the new organs, which develop timbres with great dynamics, depth, presence and power in the vast church interior. Dominik Keggenhoff created images for the artwork on the subject of this recording.

This new release features rare cello music by contemporary composers from Nothern Holland performed by Wytske Holtrop. In 2018, Wytske Holtrop graduated cum laude for her master’s degree at the Haute École de Musique de Genève (Geneva University of Music), where she studied with professor François Guye. She obtained a highly distinguished bachelor’s degree at the Koninklijk Conservatorium of Brussels (Royal Conservatoire of Brussels) with professor Jeroen Reuling. As of the 2019 - 2020 concert season, Wytske will be playing with the Konzerthausorchesterin Berlin, as a member of the Kurt Sanderling orchestra academy.

In 1735 Handel gave up opera due to dwindling public demand and turned his attention to the great sacred compositions. However, he took with him essential elements of the opera and transferred them to the oratorio, which he also called Sacred Dramas. The countertenor Franz Vitzthum has selected a number of wonderful Sacred Arias from various of these Sacred Dramas, in which his light, bell-pure alto voice comes into its own. He has compiled these arias into an exciting programme, which is finely set in scene by the Orfeo Baroque Orchestra conducted by Julian Tölle.

The neglect of the vast majority of Saint-Saëns' chamber and orchestral output is a loss to music lovers everywhere. Even worse is the condescending attitude of musical academia toward a composer who not only was fantastically gifted in his own right, but a true scholar and student of the classics. And if his own works sometimes reflect the result of this knowledge, then what's the harm? The composer himself once said something along these lines: "He who does not get absolute pleasure from a series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music."

Renata Pereira writes of this new release: This album is entirely dedicated to the music of Brazil. It is very different from Falando Brasileiro (2014) because it is a Brazilian music sound photograph of the twentieth century. It is also very special work, because this photograph is unheard of! The repertoire on this album has never been recorded previously on recorders. We also present two original Brazilian compositions for the instrument, one of which was written in 2019 and is dedicated to the ensemble. It is an important part of our work to reveal Brazilian music and to promote the interest of Brazilian composers to write music for our instrument. As passionate as we are about the recorders history and its repertoire, to play our national music is to tell our musical story and not a foreign story.

The voice of the Narrator (Testo) shall be clear, steady and with good pronunciation, () in keeping with the passions of the oration. Thus the recommendation by Claudio Monteverdi in the preface to his Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, published in Venice in 1638. Monteverdi's remarks on performance together with his actual music underline the tension between passions here between love and death, (Amore e morte, as the present collection is entitled), a combination which most people associate with a romantic aesthetic or sensibility. Yet an awareness of this association is better served through Monteverdi's fusion of words and music, heightening the perception of each by the combination of the two.

So Jin Kim writes of her new release: Mozarts music led me to discover my love for music at a young age. His music has been and continues to be a source of calm, inspiration, and motivation throughout my life and career. I hope that this recording conveys my love and appreciation towards his music. Mozart composed his third violin concerto, K. 216at the age of 19, most likely for himself or his father.

This is chamber music written by an 18th century Italian composer who may or may not have been an ancestor of Frank Zappa. The younger Zappa discovered the music at the music library at the University of California at Berkeley and programmed it into his Synclavier. The result is pleasant-enough European classical music with an electronic twinge – in the same category as Switched-On Bach.

Agricola was praised by his contemporaries for the bizarre turn of his inspiration, and his music likened to quicksilver. By the standards of the period this is a highly unusual turn of phrase, but remains spot-on. The Ferrara Ensemble anthology, the first ever devoted to the composer, focused on the secular music, both instrumental and vocal, precisely the area covered by Michael Posch and Ensemble Unicorn in this most satisfying disc. Where there's duplication (surprisingly little, in fact) the performances compare with those of the Ferrara Ensemble, although the style of singing is very different. The voices are more up front and less inflected, perhaps the better to match the high instruments with which they're sometimes doubled. But the tensile quality of Agricola's lines comes through none the less, as does the miraculous inventiveness and charm of his music. Further, much of what's new to the catalogue really is indispensible, for example Agricola's most famous song, Allez, regretz. Unicorn keeps its improvisations and excursions to a minimum, and the music is the better for it. It really is a must-have.