Subtitled Devotional Music from 17th-century Hamburg, A German Soul from Brilliant Classics is a varied program of instrumental, solo vocal and organ pieces dating, for the most part, from the early Baroque. The eight composers represented were all active in northern Germany at some point or...

With nearly a record a year as leader since his late 1980s recording debut, not to mention the dozens of recorded sideman appearances, veteran guitarist Dave Stryker has amassed a substantial discography of considerable depth and quality, leading varied small group combinations from trio to...

Jake Heggie is one of the today’s outstanding composers. He has written many fine works and is perhaps this country’s greatest living opera composer. Heggie made a big splash with Moby Dick and was greatly praised for Dead Man Walking. Working again with his long-standing librettist,...

The story behind the two composers whose music appears on this Ramée CD is as fascinating as the music itself. Performed on a ten-course lute by Anthony Bailes, the disc is titled Intavolatura di liuto. Two members of an illustrious Italian family, Michelagnolo Galilei and his father,...

Sky | Lift, the Sunnyside label debut of pianist Randy Ingram and most welcome and overdue successor to 2009s The Road Ahead (Brooklyn Jazz Underground), announces itself immediately as an album of warmth, openness, buoyancy, thoughtfulness and optimism, and maintains a course reflective of...

Imagine listening to some amazing music, written by a contemporary of Mozart who is not even listed in Grove’s or Baker’s. That is the case with this wonderful CD of the fortepiano works of Felipe Rodriguez. There are very few existing works from this priest who became an organist....

Award winning German trio Atos Trio perform on this excellent Farao Classics release titled The French Album. Four works for piano trio make up the program, ranging from the seldom-heard Chaminade, Françaix and Boulanger pieces to one that lies at the core of the repertoire by Debussy. The...

Mexico’s leading classical music label, Urtext Digital Classics, offers a catalog of well over a hundred titles, most of which feature artists and composers from The Americas. This recent release titled 3 Conciertos from March of 2014 offers a trio of concertos by Mexican composer Samuel...

Some composers are satisfied to live quiet but purposeful lives, have many children and leave a great musical legacy. Others are like Alessandro Stradella (1639-1682) who led the life of a scoundrel in the midst of a great musical career, living to only 42 years of age. He lived the life that...

This is the second CD recommended on Expedition Audio of music by German composer Johann Georg Reutter (1708-1772), who has long been handed the short end of the proverbial stick by history’s musicologists. Appraisals of Reutter’s art coming from the past couple centuries contrast...

This is the second disc from the Audite label of piano trios by the German composer and virtuoso pianist, Eduard Franck. Given the high quality of the music, it’s surprising so little of it has previously been recorded. Of the three pieces on this program, there is one other version of...

As it is played here, the complete piano music of Arvo Pärt takes about two hours to perform and fits neatly on these two Brilliant Classics CDs. I’ve qualified this statement with “as it is played here” because some of the music is rather improvisatory, leaving much to the...