Chances are excellent that, unless you remember the sixteenth volume of the old brown-backed set of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians – "Riegel to Schusterfleck" – then you have never encountered composer Henri-Joseph Rigel. The scion of a musical family that also spelled its name "Riegel," Rigel studied with Niccolò Jommelli and Franz Xaver Richter before arriving in Paris in 1767; although his musical language remained essentially Italo-German, Rigel is mainly considered a French composer as the bulk of his work and sphere of influence was centered in Paris. He was a member of the Concert Spirituel, a reasonably prolific and successful composer of opera and oratorio (his La Sortie d'Egypte has been revived in modern times in Europe), and served on the founding faculty of the Paris Conservatoire, beginning in 1795.

This album marked Vesala's return to ECM a decade after his last release for the label, Satu. Only one musician remained from his last appearance, Pentti Lahti. However, the aesthetic remains the same: a sensuous kind of free jazz with an air of ritual, and one tune from long ago reappears in a new guise ("The Wind" off the Nan Madol album). Most of the tracks here have something very distinctive about them, even if the instrumental lines wildly proliferate in the free jazz fashion. "Frozen Melody" opens with a beautiful introduction from Lahti that sounds like mid-period Coltrane. "Calypso Bulbosa" suddenly turns things electric and slightly funky with its electronic drums.

Israeli-born Hagai Shaham here completes his survey of Hubay’s violin concertos, with these immaculate accounts of Nos 1 & 2. Hubay is widely acknowledged as the founder of the ‘Hungarian school’ of violin playing. His list of protégées includes the virtuoso violinist Ilona Fehér who went on to teach Hagai Shaham. The sonorous, round and broad tone that is the main beauty of the Hubay-school is unmistakable in Shaham’s performance.

Active as a soloist and as a member of leading early music groups worldwide, Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann has appeared on a number of BIS releases, often being singled out in reviews for her performances as continuo player and soloist. For her first solo disc, she has devised a programme illustrating the rise of the cello – from its beginnings as a large-bodied, deep-voiced provider of accompaniments in church music to a glittering, flittering solo instrument of the Rococo. The programme begins with some of the earliest repertoire for the instrument – two unaccompanied pieces by Domenico Galli and Giovanni Battista degli Antonii, and a solo sonata by Domenico Gabrielli, all hailing from around 1690.