Think you know Richard Strauss’s songs? Think again. Chances are you know a handful, possibly a few dozen, but did you know there are over 190? Brigitte Fassbaender believes it’s the fault of lazy singers and audiences who happily listen to the same ‘Morgens’ and ‘Zueignungs’ time after time, never exploring other riches – and riches there are, several revealed for the first time in this beautifully curated box. Strauss wrote his first song, a charming Christmas ditty, aged six, and his last, Malven, in 1948 at the ripe old age of 78. In between he poured his heart and soul into a series that includes too many masterpieces to mention and remarkably few duds. These recordings, made in Garmisch, the small town where Strauss owned a villa involved 13 singers and Fassbaender herself as narrator of his two melodramas, one of which is the hour-long Enoch Arden. Not every singer is perfect (recording songs in their original – generally high – keys taxes a few), but all round it’s a first rate set, full of discoveries. Among the standouts are mezzo Anke Vondung who gives oodles of gooseflesh with her use of text, delicious high soprano Anja-Nina Bahrmann, and…

One of the delights of this disc is the way Argentinian mezzo Bernarda Fink puts her deeply expressive instrument at the service of the text.

You only have to hear Dawn Upshaw or Barbara Bonney sing Aaron Copland’s exquisite Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson to know what’s wrong here.

Set up less than a decade ago, the choir of Merton College is a relative newcomer to Oxford’s choral life, but in its short existence it has punched well above its weight. Unsurprising perhaps, given that one of its directors is Peter Phillips. The Tallis Scholars which Phillips also directs have been recording in Merton chapel for years, taking advantage of its splendid acoustic. To celebrate its 750th year the college has undertaken two visionary projects to support the choral foundation. The first is the installation of a superb new pipe organ. The second is the creation of the Merton Choirbook, a collection of music commissioned from composers from around the globe including a work by Melbourne composer, Christopher Willcock, whose Missa Brevis will be premiered later this year. This program of mainly a cappella music is mostly traditional Anglican fare enlivened with more recent works, including some from the Choirbook. All of the music is beautifully sung, whether it be favourites such as This is the record of John (Gibbons), Hear my prayer, O Lord (Purcell) or Valiant for Truth (Vaughan Williams). Amongst the new music, the Nunc dimittis from Eriks Ešenvalds’s evening canticles, James Lavino’s Beati quorum via…

Carolyn Sampson has long avoided the harsh glare of stardom but become a favourite singer for “those in the know” – and if you are not one of those it is about time you were. She has graced an extensive array of fine recordings over the last decade or so, standing out amongst some starry casts with her impeccable technique and musicality. A few years ago she gave us a superb recital of Rameau arias, Regne Amour, in collaboration with Jeffrey Skidmore’s group Ex Cathedra and follows up with this delightful gem. The program is a tribute to Marie Fel who was the superstar soprano of the French Baroque, captivating the Paris Opera and Concert Spirituel in a career lasting 35 years. She even inspired the philosopher Rousseau to compose a Salve regina included here. She was the darling of the intelligentsia and her 81 years were full of colourful incident, including bearing three children to three fathers. If 73 minutes of French Baroque soprano arias might seem a daunting prospect with a whole lot of twittering trills and appoggiaturas, do not be fazed as this program has been cleverly chosen with sacred works, including an Italianate Laudate pueri by…

Lyle Chan's string quartet is affecting music and a unique and powerful means of relating a terrible history.

With this second disc devotedto the music of Joaquín Turina, the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Juanjo Mena present highly idiomatic and colourful evocations of the composer’s native region of Andalusia. Built around the song cycle that gives the disc its name, native soprano Maria Espada gives the most persuasive account of the orchestral song cycle since the old mono recording by Victoria De Los Ángeles (EMI). Not only is she successful at colouring this evocative score, Espada is highly sympathetic to the composer’s desire to bring his beloved home city of Seville so vividly to life with its gypsy rhythms and religious processions. As in the other compositions here, Turina brings an almost technicolor brillliance to these, and it is this quality, aided and abetted by the conductor, which makes this disc such an enjoyable experience. One must also applaud the sheer virtuosity brought to bear by an orchestra of the calibre of the BBC Philharmonic. Elsewhere, these almost electric interpretations bring Turina’s Andalusia to life, be it in La procesión del Rocio, Danzas gitanas or the more intimate sound world of Rapsodia sinfónica for piano and string orchestra wherein Martin Roscoe proves an ideal soloist. Recorded in such vivid, naturalistic…

Entering his fifth decade of performing, it would be natural to expect John Williams to take a creative step back.

British conductor Jonathan Cohen has a refreshing lack of concern for apparently ‘sacred’, apparently never to be tampered with, performance traditions that can, and do, leave other performances of the B Minor Mass historically boxed-in. Cohen calmly reconnects us with JS Bach’s actual sacred inner-life. Like John Butt’s 2009 reading with the Dunedin Consort on Linn Records, intuition tells you that Cohen’s new B Minor Mass will be viewed kindly by history, the freshness of this conceptually rigorous and unified recording born of an active engagement with the material, rather than requiring the piece to slot conveniently inside an existing point of view. Not that Cohen has anything much in common with Butt. In Arcangelo, period and modern instruments coexist unapologetically, while the Dunedin Consort is an ideologically hardcore period instrument group. Butt unsurprisingly adheres to one-voice-to-a-part whereas Cohen deploys four voices – except in the Confiteor Unum Baptisma where he too reverts to one voice per part, appropriately framing Bach’s subliminal glance back to an older contrapuntal style. But the nuances of Cohen’s perspective run deeper than mere matters of personnel. Butt – alongside other recent interpreters on record: hello Marc Minkowski and Philippe Herreweghe – need you to…

It is now six years since aficionados of the classic Broadway musical mourned the tragically early death of John McGlinn, who did such exhaustive work creating definitive recordings with authentic orchestrations and vocal arrangements. We can thank EMI (now Warner Classics) for signing John Wilson who has continued in the tradition but with a focus on the film musical. The first two albums, That’s Entertainment and Rodgers and Hammerstein at the Movies, were delightful romps and this latest is likewise. Wilsons’ reconstructions of the souped-up Hollywood orchestrations are delivered by his hand-picked band in period style with swoopy strings and fruity saxes, but with just enough British reserve to avoid going over-the-top in glitz; one can still visualise a knowing campy twinkle in the eye. His casting of singers is impeccable; genuine Broadway style voices with no nasty modern pop-vocalist mannerisms or plum-in-the-gob operatic diction – oh, how nice it is to hear every delicious Porter lyric clearly enunciated in a natural idiomatic style. Most of the program is from the 1950s, so the opening number from Silk Stockings makes an apt curtain raiser as a paean to the technological innovations of that decade with Anna-Jane Casey and Matthew Ford…

With this new recording featuring a selection of Vivaldi’s motets for alto voice, stellar French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky comes full circle a decade or so after his previous two recordings devoted to Vivaldi’s most virtuosic music. In doing so, he similarly demonstrates the operatic and concerto-like qualities of these ostensibly devotional works. This is music that delights in virtuosity, both subtle and exultant, as a legitimate form of praise.  If motets such as Clarae stellae, first performed in 1715 at the Ospedale della Pietà whose name is forever linked to that of the Red Priest’s, and Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater of 1712 demonstrate a more demure style with occasional melismatic outbursts, it’s a different story with the later Longe mala, umbrae, terrores. In the first section alone, Jaroussky must negotiate unrelenting roulades, which he does with uncompromising élan; likewise the final Alleluia which most obviously recalls an opera aria or the final movement of some lost violin concerto. But just listen to the honeyed, tender melismas in Descende, o coeli vox and Jaroussky reveals a truer, deeper artistry.  So with these works, which include an exquisite introduction to a lost Miserere, a gently throbbing Salve Regina and the Domine Deus from…

Here is a really indispensible set of recordings.