Turns out cooking a really good French meal is akin to performing classical music; you can’t fake either of them.

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Two young quartets tackle a pair of opposing works from Haydn and Shostakovich.

Here are our shortlists of the 25 albums of 2015 rated most highly by our critics. But which will come out on top?

Rush, Russell Beale, Salminen & Skovhus: four Lears on tackling Shakespeare’s tortured monarch. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

★★★★½ A very French finish to Musica Viva’s 70th-birthday year. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

We ask Ensemble Offspring’s co-AD about past bizarre experiences and what we should expect in the future. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Virtuosic and versatile, an evening showing off the neglected riches of the recorder and the harp. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The eminent violinist cut his first disc in the USSR aged ten, but now he believes the labels are letting artists down. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Astonishingly, the Belgian composer, organist and pianist Joseph Jongen (1873-1953) entered the Liège Conservatoire at the age of just eight. So one can imagine the gifts bestowed upon a musician who was at one time considered the greatest living Belgian composer and who is today chiefly remembered for his organ music. This is Volume 85 in Phaedra’s In Flanders’ Fields series, which aims to give listeners some idea of the richness and beauty of Flemish and Belgian classical music, past and present, performed by Flemish musicians. According to Phaedra’s website, the enterprising Flemish label wants to shine “a light on music by composers from the Low Countries, especially from Flanders and Wallonia… to save them from indifference and oblivion.” Here the spotlight is on Jongen’s chamber music for winds, with and without piano. The earliest work is the Lied for horn and piano; the most mature, the Concerto, Op. 124 for woodwind quintet (1942). 5 Beaufort (the Brussels Woodwind Quintet), which comprises players from the National Orchestra of Belgium, and Belgian pianist Hans Ryckelynck, choose however to open with the uncharacteristically modernist Rhapsodie, Op. 70 for woodwind quintet and piano (1922). The remaining works are an attractive blend of Saxon late-Romanticism…

With LP nostalgia now playing a major role in classical music purchases, we open our ears to a blast from the past.

On paper, this album by New York City-based chamber orchestra The Knights looks like a goer. Each piece – apart from Bach’s Concerto for Violin and Oboe, which is the genuine article – riffs off re-imagined ideas of the Concerto Grosso: a small body of soloists co-existing against the firepower of an orchestra. The Knights are musicians on a mission. Describing themselves as “an orchestral collective dedicated to transforming the concert experience”, the first thing to go is a conductor and I wonder if the pressure to count like crazy is why the Bach is taken at such a stampeding tempo? Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks fares better. But the group’s homogenised, pile-driver tone makes you wish for a hint of whimsy, vulnerability even. Steve Reich’s Duet for Two Violins and Strings transforms the concert experience into extreme tedium: this is one of Reich’s most casually note spun and generic scores, not helped by the glutinous recorded sound. A concerto for santur, violin and orchestra cobbled together by Colin Jacobsen (a santur being a Persian dulcimer) is episodic. The collectively composed …the ground beneath our feet, anchored around a ground bass borrowed from Baroque composer Tarquinio Merula is the final hurrah, but…