CiiVE (pronounced like 'five' but with an 's') are an Australian duo fusing electronic and analog sounds to create their debut album "My Giraffe". A collaboration between Jacqui Hunt (Single Gun Theory) and Brian Conolly, the album has elements of pop, rock and ambient jazz undertones, combined with live drums and sampled sounds. From the pop guitar track of "Feather and Down", to the crescendo of rock-tronic track "Bleed Your Love" and the electrojazz title track "Giraffe", enveloped with the distinct vocals of Jacqui Hunt. "My Giraffe" is an album experience, transposing between moods from side A to B.

Arvo Pärt, by virtue of his distinctive, soulful music, enthuses his audience like no other contemporary classical composer. This album is the first-ever compilation of all compositions by Pärt that have been transcribed for saxophone quartet - revealing them, so to speak, without words, "only" through breath, through oscillating columns of air. The Italian Alea Saxophone Quartet master this task brilliantly.

On one hand, there's nostalgia, and on the other, there's the knowledge that sometimes they just got it right a few decades ago. Roya's upbeat, jangly indie pop has a very '60s-sounding tone on their self-titled debut album, but Rahill Jamalifard doesn't sound like your typical girl group-era vocalist, and that's obviously how she wants it. Jamalifard possesses the requisite amount of poise for this gig, and there's a breathy cool to her instrument that suits the music very well indeed.

To celebrate their 40th anniversary, the revered Emerson String Quartet chose to work on the electric chaconnes and fantasias of English composers Britten and Purcell. The ensemble delves deep, especially into the former, whose chamber works embody the free lyricism and shimmering dissonance of the greatest moments of modernism.

Deutsche Grammophon is undoubtedly home to many of the greatest pianists on record both past and present with the piano repertoire occupying a central position in its long distinguished history. The Yellow Label presents a collection of outstanding performances from its unrivalled roster of pianists: from the greats Argerich, Barenboim and Zimerman to the younger generation Seong-Jin Cho, Yuja Wang and Jan Lisiecki.

Late sixteenth-century Florence was a theatre: first and foremost a political one, in the eyes of the dynasties that wished to use the arts to display their power. A humanist one too, as is shown by these intermedi (interludes) that sought to achieve the perfect blend between music and poetry, the ideal of a certain Renaissance. Inserted into plays imitating the ancient writers, these entertainments were presented with lavish visual and musical resources. After reaching an initial peak in 1589 with the intermedi composed for Bargagli’s La pellegrina, this tradition was prolonged in the burgeoning genre of opera by such composers as Peri, Caccini (Euridice, 1600) and, very soon, Monteverdi (L’Orfeo) and Gagliano (Dafne).

Despite her youth, Ellen Nisbeth has received acclaim both in her native Sweden and abroad and is one of the Rising Stars selected by the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) for the 2017/2018 season. A former student of London's Royal College of Music, she hails from a family of Scottish origin and feels a particular affinity for the landscapes of Scotland, and for the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. For her first recital disc Ellen Nisbeth has devised an all-British programme which includes her own transcriptions of selected songs from Songs of Travel – Ralph Vaughan Williams's settings of poems by Stevenson. The songs intersperse the remainder of the programme, and one of them – Let Beauty Awake – has also lent its title to the entire disc. Together with the eminent pianist and chamber musician Bengt Forsberg, Nisbeth goes on to perform the impassioned Viola Sonata composed in 1919 by Rebecca Clarke – a well-known piece among viola-players, but deserving of a wider audience.

Dan Hicks was an American Treasure. Since the early 1960’s, Hicks deftly blended elements of Swing, Jazz, Folk and Country music to create a truly unique sound. His lyrics range from the simply sublime to the sublimely ridiculous, all presented with his uniquely skewed and inscrutable touch. Dan’s irresistible sense of rhythm, hip lyrical styling, laid back vocalizing, and infamous on-stage wit lasted well through his final recordings with us at Surfdog Records. So, in celebration of his life and legacy, we pay tribute to Dan with this album (marking the 1-year anniversary of his passing), humbled and proud that we had him in the Surfdog family. Here’s to the music, the laughs, and the wild ride…these are Dan’s GREATEST LICKS!!

Whether frontier his own ensembles with colleagues like Orrin Evans, Nasheet Waits, Kris Davis, Andrew Cyrille, Darius Jones and Jason Moran, double bassist Eric Revis has established himself as much for his experimentations into the unknown as with mainstream jazz forms (Branford Marsalis Quartet, Betty Carter). On his newest album as a leader, “Sing Me Some Cry” (Clean Feed), he goes a long way beyond anything he’s achieved before. “Sing” is the next step beyond 2013’s “Parallax” (Clean Feed), his first recorded pairing with multi-reedist and MacArthur Fellow Ken Vandermark, the Chicago experimental scion. It shows Revis’ astoundingly flexible range with a huge grounded sound.

Coldplay capitalize on the multicolored positivity of A Head Full of Dreams with Kaleidoscope, an EP that ties together all the threads left hanging by that sparkling 2015 album. Although Kaleidoscope is named after a Head Full of Dreams album track - available here in a new, airy mix - the key track is "Something Just Like This," the group's collaboration with the EDM duo Chainsmokers that became a huge hit in the first half of 2017. The version here, disingenuously dubbed "Tokyo Remix," may be live but its big laser beats tie Coldplay into a modern pop, one that easily slips between surface charms and subdued experimentalism…

Haydn2032, the ambitious project of recording the complete symphonies of Haydn, has been placed from the start under the artistic direction of Giovanni Antonini, with two ensembles, Il Giardino Armonico, which made the first four volumes, and the Kammerochester Basel, to which this fifth volume and the next two are assigned. Another characteristic of the edition is that each time Haydn is set in perspective with another composer; here it is Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-92): ‘Kraus was the first man of genius that I met. Why did he have to die? It is an irreparable loss for our art. The Symphony in C minor he wrote in Vienna specially for me is a work which will be considered a masterpiece in every century’, said Haydn in 1797. Though he long remained forgotten after his death, Kraus made an active contribution to the movement of poetic renewal called ‘Sturm und Drang’ or ‘Geniezeit’ (time of genius) because such artists as the young Goethe broke free of all tradition to follow their hearts alone. When Haydn called Kraus homme de génie, in French, he probably had this context in mind. The two composers had met in Vienna in 1783.

Psychedelic rock band from St. Joseph, Missouri. A full-length album was recorded in 1969, but was not released until Numero Group issued it in 2015, giving it a new life.

The three cantatas brought together here are from Telemann’s last printed annual cycle, which was published in Hermsdorf (near Hirschberg), Silesia, in 1749. Each cantata has a title page indicating the particular Sunday, registering the ensemble parts under it, and displaying a decorative figure modeled on a putto as an ornament on the lower half of the page. Since the putto was also understood as an angel, the cycle came to be known as the »Engel-Jahrgang« (Angel Cycle). In addition, the title contains a pithy motto that seems to be referring to Telemann: »You glorify the sweet harmony of the art of music and sanctify it.« As in his other annual cycles issued in printed form, the compositions were presented in Hamburg churches prior to their publication or along with it. These are joyful works of dancy verve to which Telemann supplied additional splendor in many movements through the use of trumpets.

The third full-length release for the hard rock band that includes Thin Lizzy's Ricky Warwick, Scott Gorham, Damon Johnson, and Jimmy DeGrasso, as well ex-Ratt member Robbie Crane, was produced by Nick Raskulinecz. Limited Edition Embossed Digibook CD (inc bonus track) - There's a beautiful purity to the finest rock 'n' roll, a thrilling simplicity in striking an over-amplified guitar chord, a transcendent joy in getting high on just volume, adrenaline and a backbeat. Black Star Riders, lifers in an industry less secure than a secret in a soap opera, understand this, which is why Heavy Fire, the quintet's third album for Nuclear Blast, sounds so fresh and exhilarating and alive. Recorded with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Deftones, Rush) at Rock Falcon Studio in Franklin, Tennessee, the follow up to BSR's acclaimed 2015 release The Killer Instinct, finds the quintet - frontman Ricky Warwick, guitarists Scott Gorham and Damon Johnson, bassist Robbie Crane and drummer Jimmy DeGrasso - in electric form, crashing through 10 tracks of swaggering, life-affirming hard rock with a shared passion and power both irresistible and inspiring.