This interesting disc from Dux surveys early Polish string quartets by two major figures in Polish music who were contemporaries of Chopin, Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski, and Stanislaw Moniuszko. Moniuszko is best known through his operas and large sacred choral works; outside of the two string quartets played here by the Camerata Quartet, he produced almost nothing in terms of chamber music. Dobrzynski wrote four operas, of which Monbar, or the Freebooters (1838) was the work the composer considered his most important. However, in posterity it is through instrumental music that Dobrzynski is known – his two symphonies, various pieces in concertante format, and numerous chamber and solo piano works have kept his name alive.

The revamped 1995 edition of Anthology includes all of the group's hit singles, as well as significant album tracks and singles that didn't chart, making it the definitive portrait of the popular, groundbreaking urban contemporary group.

Mozart was still in nappies at the time when Haydn more or less single-handedly invented the string quartet. Nearly half a century later, as he struggled - and failed - to complete his last quartet, Beethoven was already at work on his Eroica Symphony. In the interim, Haydn wrote considerably more quartet masterpieces than Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert put together, raising the medium to a level of sophistication, subtlety and originality that provided a yardstick for all later composers. Mind you, it took him some time to get there: it isn't until the eighth CD of this set that we reach the first of the unequivocally great works, the six quartets which make up Op. 20.

J.S. Bach’s genius is universally revered by music lovers, and a significant part of his output was in transcriptions of his own work, a tradition kept alive in Eleonor Bindman’s piano versions of the Six Suites for Solo Cello. Bindman has avoided embellishing these iconic pieces, preserving the intriguing ambiguities in Bach’s implied harmonies and savouring their expressive qualities through the baritone register of a marvellous Bösendorfer piano. These admirably accurate transcriptions reveal the mysterious mathematical grace and flexibility of structure that makes Bach’s art so organic and eternal.