This delightful disc offers a selection from the wealth of piano transcriptions of Bach's music. The Bach revival that gathered momentum during the nineteenth century created a climate for many composer-pianists to interpret his works through their own piano transcriptions, whether of chorale preludes, organ works or other instrumental music. Much of Bach's music was made domestically available via such arrangements (and the tradition continued well into the twentieth century, even after Bach originals were well known). Indeed, the practice of such transcriptions was widely used by Bach himself, who freely adapted his own and others' music for different instrumental settings.

"The most dramatic piece that Berlioz ever wrote," is how conductor John Nelson describes La Damnation de Faust. The composer designated this thrilling hybrid of oratorio and opera a 'légende dramatique'. Following in the triumphant footsteps of Les Troyens, also recorded at the Auditorium Erasme in Strasbourg, this performance reunites Nelson and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg with singers Michael Spyres, Joyce DiDonato and Nicolas Courjal.

A fresh new recording of Jean Sibelius early breakthrough work by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under its conductor Hannu Lintu. This recording with two male choirs, the Estonian National Male Choir and the Polytech Choir, brings up the full drama of this gigantic 70-minute work which during Sibelius lifetime was often referred to as a symphony. The work tells the story of Kullervo, a tragic hero drawn from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. While a student in Vienna, Sibelius started planning to write a large work that would crystallize the rising Finnish national feeling in music.

It is an album devoted to excerpts from the Schemelli-Liederbuch. This song book was a mammoth collection of hymns or chorales put together by Georg Christian Schemelli, a choirmaster in Zeitz, Germany, in the first half of the 18th century. (His son studied with Bach.) For the hymnal, Bach contributed figured basses (to guide in the harmonization by the performer) for 69 chorale melodies. He also was responsible for a few melodies themselves and some complete harmonizations.

This disc from the Bogotá, Colombia-based ensemble Música Ficta jumps on the fast-moving bandwagon carrying Baroque music from Latin America. It is billed, with unnecessary specificity, as covering "Feast and Devotion in High Peru of the seventeenth century," but like other releases in this general repertoire it ranges widely, including music from other Latin American countries and from Spain itself, and covering music of several centuries. The subtitle is a bit misleading but not seriously annoying, for all this music traveled quite a bit in its time, and all the lands that are individual countries today were simply part of New Spain.

Armonico Consort return to album on Signum with a collection of Handel arias, performed by leading counter-tenor William Towers. A noted soloist in both opera and oratorio, the programme is taken from roles which Towers has sung across his career in various productions across the globe. Towers writes: “It is the life-affirming, live-giving aspect of Handel that I’m aiming to celebrate. So frequently his operas reveal their most devastatingly beautiful and uplifting music when life is at its darkest. Here the arias shine brightest, here we find Radamisto’s ‘Ombra cara’ and the boundlessly optimistic ‘Dopo l’orrore’, looking out beyond the darkest clouds to the faint glimmer of a dawning hope. This is the uncrushable, indomitable spirit that lies in all of us … We just need to take the time to listen.”

For a monk resident in one of post-Reformation Germany’s religious institutions, music would have served as a focus of spiritual discipline as well as a source of joy. Some real discoveries await the listener who joins The Brabant Ensemble on this exploration of the monk’s musical life, represented by a variety of composers of greater and lesser familiarity.

The original version of Simon Boccanegra, first performed in 1857, is a masterpiece of concision and vocal delivery, with many important differences from the later 1881 version, including one of Verdi’s most innovative central finales. Sir Mark Elder leads a star cast including Eri Nakimura as Amelia, Iván Ayón-Rivas as her lover Gabriele, William Thomas as Fiesco and the young Argentinian baritone Germán Enrique Alcántara in the title role.

Canadian star pianist Jan Lisiecki’s upcoming album puts the focus on the kaleidoscopic world of the prelude. Lisiecki himself refers how he is seeking “to showcase the broad possibilities of the humble Prelude” that takes “the audience on a musical expedition”. Composers from multiple eras, whose works are featured, include Bach, Messiaen, Rachmaninoff, Górecki and of course Chopin, who is known for having reinvented the prelude with his iconic 24 Preludes Op. 28.

The term 'South German' in keyboard music refers geographically to the southern part of the German-speaking region, also containing parts of Austria and Switzerland – and even eastern European regions of Poland, Bohemia and Transylvania. Joseph Kelemen has been an active church musician in the South German region since 1986. He is passionately dedicated to historical performance practice and is considered in the specialist world as the authority for German organ music of the 17th century and the organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Mahler considered The Song of the Earth his most personal work, and indeed it is one of his greatest and most moving. Its six sections, sung alternately by the mezzo-soprano and tenor, are set to seven poems from The Chinese Flute, a collection of Chinese lyrics translated into German by Hans Bethge, which echo Mahler's love of nature and contrast the earth's renewal each spring with the transience of human life. Composed after he lost his beloved 4-year-old daughter and was diagnosed with a serious heart ailment, the music encompasses heart-rending anguish and sublime ecstasy; conceived in the shadow of death, it is suffused with a sense of sorrowful, reluctant leave-taking finally transformed into resigned renunciation.

It was an awakening experience when Christoph Koncz, principal violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic and conductor, first held Mozarts original concert violin in his hands. This was the violin on which Mozart had played as concertmaster in the Salzburg Hofkapelle: a Baroque violin that was carefully preserved after Mozarts death and treated almost as a holy relic. The idea of recording Mozarts five violin concertos for the first time on the composers own concert violin was one that Christoph Koncz found irresistibly fascinating. Theres a close connection between these concertos and this instrument, and Mozarts own experience of this violin undoubtedly inspired him greatly.

Lyrische Symphonie is a setting of poems (in German translation) from the 1913 collection of poems entitled The Gardener by the Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). The work, which plays continuously, consists of seven poems set alternately for baritone and soprano soloists; they are accompanied by a substantial orchestra. In his exemplary booklet essay, Andrew Huth points out that it was Zemlinsky himself who drew a parallel between the Lyrische Symphonie and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. However, Huth goes on to make an important distinction between the two works. “Mahler’s great song-symphony is above all a recollection of experience, with meticulous and lingering attention to the beauty and transience of the natural world. In Tagore’s verses there is yearning, but no nostalgia.

Vaughan Williams composed his ‘ballad-opera’ Hugh the Drover, from which A Cotswold Romance is adapted, between 1910 and 1914. In his own words, he had an idea for an opera written ‘to real English words, with a certain amount of real English music’. The finished product, set in the Cotswold Village of Northleach during the Napoleonic wars, certainly does contain a host of identifiable English elements: the bringing-in of May, the bustling fair, and the prize-fight, for instance. Accommodating his publishers’ request for a version of the music which was more appropriate for concert performance, Vaughan Williams came up with the cantata A Cotswold Romance for tenor and soprano soloists with mixed-voice chorus and orchestra. The writing has the open, fresh, and vital quality that coloured many of Vaughan Williams’s works composed before the First World War.

Edward MacDowell was the most highly regarded American composer of his generation, and the first to acquire a truly international reputation. Born in New York, he briefly studied piano as a teenager at the Paris Conservatoire, but quickly left to explore what he regarded as the more congenial musical environment in Germany. He studied piano and composition in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, and then Frankfurt. After graduating in 1880, he remained in Germany for four years, before returning home, first to Boston, for eight years, and then finally to New York where he became Columbia University’s first Professor of Music.