The disc is the thirteenth volume in the famous Hyperion 'Romantic Piano Concerto' series; it also follows on from Stephen Coombs's four-volume set of Glazunov's music for solo piano, meaning that Coombs has now recorded all of Glazunov's music for piano soloist.

Selim Palmgren, a student of Busoni, was one of the leading Nordic composers during the first decades of the 20th century. His wide-ranging music for piano was performed and recorded by some of the greatest artists of the day. This third volume in the first complete cycle of Palmgren’s piano music on disc includes a varied cross-section of works written over a 50-year period. It includes the youthful Lyriskt intermezzo, Op. 8, romantic miniatures of great charm – as well as one of his greatest achievements, the atmospheric suite Kevät (‘Spring’), in which impressionist elements fuse with rich Finnish folk melody.

Stillness and repose lie at the epicenter of the latest of violinist Angèle Dubeau’s series of “Portrait” recordings, a celebration of that master of atmosphere, Max Richter. Richter, whose credits include the soundtracks to Waltz with Bashir and Shutter Island, writes postminimalist music—richly scored, with gently undulating rhythms, beautiful, shifting modal harmonies, and subtle electronic effects. There’s often an elegant simplicity to Richter’s music, as in the cyclical “Autumn Music 2,” but there are thrilling moments, too, as pulsating electronic drums emerge from the darkness in “The Journey, Not the Destination.”

This disc offers something quite hard to get these days - Beethoven and Schubert played for their own sake under a conductor who can and does wield from the rostrum every bit of the immense authority of the best years of his cello-playing when even the intervals between the notes seemed to have been imaginatively recreated, and the phrasing presented with nothing less than perfect sensitivity and dignity, and without any desire to make points or impress by virtuoso polish. Of course his approach is of his time. But the Marlboro audience was very lucky, and so is anyone who now listens to this with an open mind. This is a great musician conducting folk who in the act of performance he treats as equals.

There are many other highly recommendable recordings by Collegium Musicum 90 under Simon Standage on the Chandos early music label, Chaconne. If you’ve heard a reasonable cross-section of the music of Vivaldi and would like to experiment with some of his near-contemporaries, their recording of Alessandro Marcello’s six Violin Concertos, Op.6, known as ‘La Cetra’, together with an extra Concerto in B-flat, would be a good place to start.

Parry was indebted to the grand Romantic tradition of the late nineteenth century, and his colourful and exuberant concerto probably lays claim to be the first British piece written in such a style worthy of comparison with contemporary continental models. It is a virtuoso work, extrovertly conceived for piano and undoubtedly written for the technical proficiency of Edward Dannreuther, one of the most important exponents of the grand concerto style in London during the 1870s and 1880s.

Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is naturally an iconic work for Leonardo García Alarcón. The Argentinian conductor has performed and matured his interpretation of Monteverdi’s masterpiece throughout his life. Together with his group of soloists, the Namur Chamber Choir and the Cappella Mediterranea ensemble, he now presents his vision of L’Orfeo: Monteverdi’s opera is as much the apotheosis of the Renaissance as a testimony to the nascent Baroque style. This is what strikes us when we listen to this new recording, which so eloquently emphasises the contrasts between sometimes nostalgic glances towards the past and the most innovative expressions of operatic language.

Giulio Mazzarino, better known as Cardinal Mazarin, played an important part in the dissemination of Italian music in France in the 17th century. From 1643, when he was appointed prime minister, to his death in 1661, he carried out an astute policy in favour of Italian culture, inviting the most famous Italian composers and performers to the French court. This disc presents a number of pieces, mainly by Italian composers, which became well known in France in the 17th century through Mazarin’s support.

Friends of long standing as well as regular partners in chamber music, Michael Collins and Stephen Hough bring their combined musical insights and expertise to bear on Johannes Brahms’s sonatas for clarinet and piano. Together with the composer’s trio for clarinet, cello and piano and clarinet quintet, the sonatas are among the most treasured works in the repertoire of the instrument – but it is partly down to good luck that we have them at all. When Brahms in 1891 heard the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinet of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, he had already announced his retirement. He was enraptured by Mühlfeld’s playing and its vocal qualities, however, and made a ‘comeback’: during the following couple of years he composed all four of his clarinet works.

With his very own “mysterious seductive power and legendary elegance” (Le Monde), Claudio Abbado opened for the last time the LUCERNE FESTIVAL in the summer of 2013. Only a few months later, the world had to bid farewell to a monumental artist, humanist, great conductor and orchestra founder. Even in the concert itself, documented here, lived a moment of farewell, as the three great works performed tell of the transience of life. The centerpiece of the Eroica is the funeral march revealing “abysses of shattering dimension” - an “intense experience” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). This record, the last audio-visual documentation of his work, captures once again the extraordinary atmosphere of “vibrant emotionality” that always emerged when Abbado created music with his “orchestra of friends”.

Rodolphe Kreutzer, a virtuoso violinist and composer, was a central figure of the French violin school. The work that brought him his most enduring fame as a composer was his forty classical Études ou Caprices for violin solo. These etudes first published in 1796, quickly established themselves in violin repertoire laying the foundations for violin technique which is why they are regarded as indispensable by virtuosos and teachers alike. The collection not only includes practice pieces that require good technical ability but also character pieces which are expressive and fun to play.

Composer, conductor, administrator, impresario, creative writer, acid critic, sometime painter, aspiring philosopher, classical symphonist, opera romantic, profound nationalist … blessed with the melodic flowering of a Mozart, the technical facility of a Mendelssohn … a man, conscious of his genius, ‘always honest and selfless in his dealings with his fellow men and with the art he loved’ (Autobiographical Sketch, Dresden, 14 March 1818) … put on a pedestal by all the post-Beethovenites, the inspiration of Mahler and Debussy, of Hindemith and Stravinsky: Carl Maria von Weber was, by universal consent, a great pianist in an age of great virtuosi.