It is an important moment in the life of a singer when she is able to confront the standard repertory. After years spent studying theatre and music in Shakespeare’s England under the guidance of musicologist Philip Brett, Jill Feldman recorded two programmes of Henry Purcell’s music in 1992, reissued here as a double CD.

August 18th marks the 100th anniversary of th e 19th Constitutional Amendment, granting women in the US the right to vote. A fitting time then for our release of the World Premier Recording of Ethel Smyths late masterpiece The Prison. Smyth left home at nineteen to study composition in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvoák, and Grieg. Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Met, in 1903.

In Jepht by Michel Pignolet de Montclair, Gyrgy Vashegyi directs with style and energy another riveting account of a neglected French Baroque opera. The work, based on the Biblical tale of a conquering general obliged, by a sacred vow, to sacrifice his own kin, became an immediate success in 1732, indeed a fixture in opera life in France, receiving over a hundred performances at the Opra alone in the three decades following its premire. Montclair and his librettist Pellegrin were open to preparing revised versions of the opera and it is the third and conclusive edition which has been worked on by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and recorded by Vashegyi and his musicians.

Handel's arrival in Rome seems to have had a miraculous influence on his development as a composer. Something about the eternal city ignited the most productive period of his entire career: there Handel worked with some of the greatest musicians of the age and enjoyed the favours of major patrons of the arts. There he also witnessed the clerical aristocracy's sensual enjoyment of those very luxuries, excesses, and trappings of beauty that they professed to deny in their sermons. In Handel in Rome, Dunedin Consort and its director John Butt set out to convey Handel's response to this stimulating and somewhat paradoxical environment with three Italian cantatas. Winner of the Rising Talent award at the 2022 International Opera Awards, Nardus Williams is the star soprano.

Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1510-1586) was one of the first native Venetians to hold the positions of Second and then First Organist in the basilica of San Marco. These were the highest musical appointments in the city, and their holders was expected to compose much of the music they played. In the event, like his predecessor Merulo and his successor (his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli), Andrea was adept at all musical forms, especially the new and up-to-date (very secular) madrigal, a sort of vocal chamber music. A splendid selection of these, interspersed with instrumental canzoni (in which one can see the influence he had on his more-famous nephew) that offer welcome contrast to the vocal music. Manfred Cordes leads Weser-Renaissance Bremen in pungent period-instrument performances.

Old Souls presents masterworks of Beethoven, Dvořák, Wolf and Kreisler in new arrangements for flute and strings, played by a group of outstanding young musicians. Guy Braunstein’s arrangements display these well-known pieces in a fresh new light, while simultaneously expanding the flute repertoire and showcasing the exceptional possibilities of the instrument, here played by Gili Schwarzman. Braunstein and Schwarzman are joined by violinist Susanna Yoko Henkel, violist Amihai Grosz and cellist Alisa Weilerstein. While the arrangement of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 23 entails a thorough recomposition of the original, the performances of Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet, Wolf’s “Italian” Serenade and Kreisler’s Syncopation stay closer to the source, with the flute taking up the role originally played by the first violin.

Like Korngold, Toch, Schoenberg, Zeisl and Zemlinsky, Richard Stöhr (1874-1967) was one of many Austrian composers driven into American exile by the Nazis. His generous output of music, being rediscovered at last in these Toccata Classics recordings, includes seven symphonies, much chamber music, songs, and choral and piano pieces. His output for organ is not extensive, but its quality is high: the instrument plays an important role in a number of Stöhr’s orchestral works, and here Stöhr presents the organ in two thoroughly attractive duos and an imposing solo sonata. The Sonata and Intermezzi sit downstream from Brahms in the tradition of Viennese classicism; the chromatic touches in the later Suite lean towards the language of Korngold.

The abundant legacy of Gustav Leonhardt’s recordings for Telefunken’s Das Alte Werk series invites us to follow his trajectory as a performer from the early 1960’s onwards, a time when the new codes of early music had yet to be invented, when their success depended above all on the strength of conviction of the performer. Leonhardt’s was strengthened by dialogue: with a range of partners whose variety defies all preconceived ideas, with ancient instruments or modern copies of all types, with repertoires as diverse as Byrd, Purcell, Rameau, Johann Sebastian but also Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Not forgetting the 1970 Monteverdi LP, which has never been reissued since. The image of a pope of early music isolated in his tower and frozen in a school style does not last long after listening to this historical sum, extended here by the later series of recordings under the Virgin Veritas flag.

These performances bring out so much of the gorgeous sonority in Gabrieli's music. The marvelous singing of the soloists and choir demonstrate the lavish riches of Gabrieli's triadic harmonies. The sound of the trombones and cornets is neatly absorbed into the overall sound of the vocal ensemble.

Lovers of high-Renaissance polyphony will find much to enjoy with this new CPO release of works by the German composer Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). Like his contemporary and friend Giovanni Gabrieli, Hassler’s advanced use of polychoral techniques (which would acheive ultimate fruition in the settings of Heinrich Schütz) earned him great fame and recognition in his day. While it’s unlikely that Hassler ever heard his music performed in a program like this, one that intersperses various combinations of solo, instrumental, and choral works, the performances nevertheless provide a fascinating musical glimpse into the work of this rarely recorded master.

Presenting First Vespers and the Salve Service as it might been celebrated in October 1617 in the presence of King Philip III and the Duke of Lerma, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players bring these early 17th century works to glowing life, the rising and falling cadences of voices mingling with the counterpoint of the magnificent organ of the Cathedral in Lerma.

Carmina Burana, the staged cantata by Carl Orff, is a work unique in musical history, claims conductor Paavo Järvi: ‘The convergence of medieval texts with such daringly original orchestral colours creates a soundworld that is both archaic and yet beyond time, in which chorus, orchestra and soloists vie in splendour.’

Investigate the music of Beethoven's contemporaries who were well enough known to be called his rivals, and the idea of Beethoven as fist-shaking revolutionary comes in for some serious revision. Jan Ladislav Dussek, Bohemian-born, became famous all over Europe for piano music that was daring in every way. The three sonatas on this disc date from the very beginning of the nineteenth century.

The 17th century - especially in Italy - was obviously much more advanced in terms of women's emancipation than many a century later. At least we know of several female composers from this period who achieved fame and glory without having to hide behind a male pseudonym.

Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhaus Orchester, Leipzig follow the international success of their recording of Gershwin's piano concerto in F with five of Bach's best loved concertos for keyboard, a recording which has already stayed 7 weeks in the Italian Pop charts. The soloist is young Iranian-born Bach specialist Ramin Bahrami. Well known on the international concert platform, Ramin Bahrami studied with the legendary American Bach pianist Rosalyn Tureck, the artist who perhaps more than any other brought the composer's keyboard works to the attention of the public through her research and recordings.