Evgueni Galperine’s ECM New Series debut is one of the most strikingly original and evocative albums of the year. A composer of Russian and Ukrainian heritage, living in Paris since 1990, Galperine is working with sound, texture and dynamics in new and powerfully expressive ways. As he explains, the sound world of Theory of Becoming represents an “augmented reality of acoustic instruments, created from recordings made with real and virtual instruments. The numerous transformations the instruments undergo allow me to capture their acoustic nature while also adding techniques and colours impossible to produce in reality…” Galperine’s compositions address wide-ranging subjects: from the resilience of hope in the face of destruction to meditations on the journey of the soul, as well as travels through space and through the magical forests of Max Ernst’s paintings.

Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.

Handel arrived in Hamburg in 1703, aged eighteen. He spent four years in the city and wrote several works for the town's opera house. Hamburg opera was a rather eclectic beast at the time, drawing on Italian and French language and instrumental style alongside the native German. Handel fell happily into this genre; this CD brings together a selection of the delightful orchestral music (which tends to be in the French style) that Handel wrote there, some of it recorded for the first time.

Les diamants de la couronne is a delightful and unfortunately neglected opera by French composer Daniel François Esprit Auber of which I believe to exist only this recording, which fortunately had been recorded both in audio and in video formats. The story centres on a queen of Portugal who, in the mid eighteenth century, sells the authentic crown jewels to replenish the exhausted coffers of State and has them counterfeit by some brigands to conceal the ruse. For this reason, she disguises herself as Catarina, pretending to be the niece of the chief of the brigands (Rebolledo) and (to spicy the story) falls in mutual love with the young Don Henrique de Sandoval, nephew of the minister of police and already promised to his cousin Diana, who, for her part, has already fallen in love with Don Sebastian. After some ups and downs, the usual happy ending will satisfy the protagonists’ wishes.

Following the album Arias, her much-acclaimed debut album on Sony Classical, the German soprano returns to Bach with three famous cantatas she has never recorded before. Regardless of their extraordinary musical beauty all of these cantatas are concerned with religious considerations of grief, guilt and farewell. Based on the Italian model of solo cantata which reached its peak in the extensive output of Alessandro Scarlatti, these melodious and touching pieces highlight Schäfer´s outstanding vocal abilities and musical taste. The arias offer most delightful duets with various instrumental solo parts such as flute, oboe and violin. Christine Schäfer is accompanied by the Berliner Barocksolisten, a first-class ensemble of players from the Berlin Philharmonic who perform on modern instruments in historically informed style.

Reto Bieri’s solo album Contrechant, released in 2011, was widely praised for the Swiss clarinettist’s beauty of tone and his uncommon expressiveness with extended instrumental techniques. Quasi Morendo begins with a new exploration of one of the pieces featured on Contrechant, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982), with its “whisper-quiet sound world of harmonics, multiphonics and tremolandos” (The Guardian). Bieri is then joined by Finnish string quartet Meta4 for a profound interpretation of Johannes Brahms’s Quintet op 115 (1891). Inspired by Brahms’s friendship with clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld the quintet sounds freer, and more idyllic, than the composer’s earlier chamber music, yet is one of his most meticulously constructed works. The album closes with Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück (1998), a ghostly re-arrangement of Brahms’s Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4.

In the 16th century, the ‘discovery’ of the Indies finally completed the human universe; it marked the beginning of a meeting between two worlds which, though violent, produced an unprecedented cultural wealth in their merging. However, the numerous historical, musicological and archaeological investigations of the sound cultures from this time have yielded few certainties. We do know, however, that this sound universe was interwoven in the baroque music of various composers, like that of Santiago de Murcia (1673–1739), an iconic figure of the late Spanish Baroque period whose work was the crucible where the sounds of both worlds, the New and the Old, were forged.

An intense and highly sought-after cellist on the Hungarian classical, contemporary, and improvisation scenes, for his first solo disc Tamás Zétényi has selected some of the most important solo string instrument pieces of the twentieth century: this album features solo sonatas by Kodály and Ligeti. In three works by two Hungarian composers, we can trace how the solo string genre, founded by Bach, was suddenly revived in the twentieth century. Kodály’s grandiose cello sonata intones with the intimacy of a soliloquy, deploying folk-music inspiration and the new harmonic world of Impressionism alongside the Bachian prototypes.

“The harmonic quality and the inner freedom of the composition can be expressed very clearly through the possibilities of the piano. The personal meeting with Mahler's genius and his work was an inspirational journey and also a great adventure for us.”

On her second PENTATONE album FLOW, Annelien Van Wauwe presents a programme inspired by her love for yoga, combining Mozart’s famous Clarinet Concerto with the world premiere recording of Wim Henderickx’s concerto SUTRA. Van Wauwe performs both works on the characteristic basset clarinet, together with the renowned NDR Radiophilharmonie under the baton of Andrew Manze.

»Hardly any other musician has ever caused me so much trouble as this Krommer: sometimes his works ap- pealed to me, sometimes they repelled me, and yet even when I did not like them, they aroused my lively interest. […] But not merely Krommer’s works in themselves were mysteries to me; it was an even greater mystery to me how this once so popular master of chamber music could be so completely forgotten soon after his death. I mean ‘forgotten’ not only in the sense that musicians eliminated his quartets from their programs […], but also in the broader sense that one passes over Krommer in silence historically and no longer mentions his name even in books on the subject of music history. […]«

Roland Pöntinen’s generously filled and beautifully engineered recital features three of Szymanowski’s most exotic and harmonically daring middle-period works together with a handful of Mazurkas that were composed near the end of his life. The Swedish pianist gives very persuasive accounts of these later more emotionally restrained pieces projecting their melodic lines with great sensitivity without disrupting their natural dance-like flow. his sense of forward momentum works particularly well in the more capricious movements of the Masques such as ‘Tantris le bouffon’ which is delivered with almost Bartókian stridency.