The field of performances competing for your CD purchase dollar has grown crowded in the case of Henrich Ignaz Franz Biber's Mystery Sonatas (or Rosary Sonatas), a set of 16 pieces for solo violin and continuo programatically linked to the Passion story. This performance by violinst Alice Piérot and Les veilleurs de Nuit is part of a remarkable series from France's Alpha label, pairing mostly Baroque works with paintings of the era. The package for this disc shows an image of Mary awaiting the Annunciation, painted around 1475 by the Neapolitan Antonello da Messina.

L'Arpeggiata's previous recordings have blended popular or folk-inspired elements with music of the Baroque in striking and imaginative ways. 'All'Improviso' takes this melting-pot approach even further, combining the Baroque ostinato bass with improvisatory techniques from both the historically aware stream of 21st-century music-making and of jazz through the participation of the clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi.

Among Handel's seventeen English oratorios, Theodora (1750) is unique. The story is not taken from the Bible, it is set in the Christian era, there is no national triumph and it does not end in joy. At the end, the hero and heroine are dead, the community with which the audience identifies is in mortal danger, and the final chorus is in a minor key. As a musical drama, it is the direct ancestor of Dialogues des Carmélites . At the age of 65, Handel produced a work that was too radical and complex for most of his audience. Today, Theodora is regarded as a benchmark "thinking person’s opera", both deeply stimulating and powerfully moving.

Andreas Staier is one of the foremost authentic-instrument keyboard players in the classical music world. He has performed with many of the world's top historical instrument ensembles and performers and has toured and recorded extensively. Staier was born on September 13, 1955, in Göttingen, Germany. His early training was on the modern piano. Courses in realizing continuo parts in Baroque music at the Hanover Conservatory led him to study harpsichord, which requires a considerably different technique of touch.

Nelson Goerner is not especially known for his Brahms, and this 2018 Alpha release of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major marks his first commercial recording of a major Brahms work. While he is widely viewed as a poet at the piano, mostly because of his introspective playing of solo piano music by Chopin and Debussy, Goerner's close-to-the-vest approach may be viewed as a liability in such a heroic and powerful work as this concerto, where assertive playing is required and pianists are expected to demonstrate muscular prowess over poetry.

It tends to be Russian performers who capture the dark, emotional undercurrents of Shostakovich's music, but few chamber groups have ever done it as well as the Belcea Quartet, a London-based group of central and eastern European players. Neither the Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57, nor the String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 73, is a commonly played work, but taken together, in the Belcea's more-than-capable hands, they have a powerful impact.

This disc is part of a remarkable series on France's Alpha label, pairing mostly Baroque repertories with detailed presentations of visual artworks that are either contemporary with the music or otherwise somehow related to it. You can get a good education in art of the seventeenth century just by buying these discs as they appear. Look at the dramatically lit detail from a 1663 painting by Lubin Baugin on the cover of the disc (the entire painting, along with other details, is reproduced inside).

Henri Dumont is an important figure in the French Baroque scene in that he was one of the pioneers in the development of the "grands motets" that saw such fruit in the works of Lully, Delaland, Campra, Charpentier, Rameau and others. From what I've heard of his music, it tends to be a bit more subdued and sombre that a lot of the festive and almost manic works from some of the others mentioned. This disc has four motets, one of which; Dialogus de anima, has been recorded before. I have the versions by Herreweghe and Rousset.

The gorgeous early music releases of France's Alpha label, each illustrated with a relevant painting along with discussion of both the music and the artwork, offer a splendid introduction to the culture of the ancien régime. The discussions get down to the kind of depth that academics traffic in, yet the performances are by and large sensuous ones entrusted to some of France's best historical-instrument ensembles.

For the seventh volume in this collection devoted to Mozart by the younger generation of soloists, the award-winning Austrian pianist Aaron Pilsan records the concerto K.459 with the ORF Radio Symphonieorchester in Vienna. French horn player Nicolas Ramez records one of his favourite concertos, the first of Mozart's four horn concertos. Finally, the young flutist Diren Duran performs the Andante for flute and orchestra K.315 before accompanying the harpist Elisabeth Plank for the divine concerto for flute, harp and orchestra K.299.The Orpheum Foundation, which has been supporting young musicians for over thirty years, has teamed up with Alpha Classics for a series of recordings devoted to Mozart's concertos on all instruments. The best soloists of the younger generation have been selected under the artistic direction of Howard Griffiths, a renowned Mozart conductor who believes that playing his music is like "looking in a mirror: you hear whether everything is in place, musicality, intonation, rhythm, phrasing"…

In this programme, the soprano Mariana Flores pays tribute to the women of Latin America, and depicts their loves, their sorrows, their joys in music with popular songs from Argentina, its wine-producing region of Cuyo and elsewhere. Accompanied by Quito Gato, who made the arrangements, on piano and guitar and Romain Lecuyer on double bass, this recital is an opportunity for listeners to discover some of the most beautiful popular songs of the twentieth century from the musicians' homeland, including Dorotea la cautiva and Alfonsina y el mar from Ariel Ramirez's collection Mujeres Argentinas, published in 1968.

This album presents the songs from The Threepenny Opera in a new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. The recording was made at the 2023 Festival d'Aix-en-Provence during the run of the new production of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, which features the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise and the musicians of Le Balcon, conducted by Maxime Pascal with Thomas Ostermeier as stage director. In this parody of an opera, the songs are the driving force behind the action and the characters ape the bourgeois lifestyle of the audience, the better to denounce the period of moral confusion they are going through. With Maxime Pascal at the helm of a dozen multi-instrumentalists from Le Balcon, we hear a version based on that of the first performance - hard-hitting and as close as possible to the tremendous creative energy deployed by the two creators of the work in the summer of 1928 - acted and sung by the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise, who rise to all its challenges with brio. Other special features of this album are a previously unrecorded song on a text by Yvette Guilbert and the linking texts between the songs read in French by Ostermeier himself. As Diapason wrote of this production, 'Almost a century after its premiere, The Threepenny Opera has lost none of its subversive power.'

For the sixth volume of this series devoted to Mozart performances by the young generation of soloists, the pianist Roman Borisov, who won First Prize at the Kissinger KlavierOlymp in 2022 when he was the youngest participant in the competition, has recorded the Concertos K413 and K415 with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. The French oboist Gabriel Pidoux, winner of the ‘Revelation’ award at the Victoires de la Musique Classique 2020, who recorded his first solo album for Alpha in 2022 (Romance, Alpha789), presents the famous Concerto K314, with the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, conducted as always by Howard Griffiths.

Most of the time, this is a stunning Schubert recital. Together, soprano Johannette Zomer and pianofortist Arthur Schoonderwoerd have put together a program that balances songs and solos. Between sets of the two Suleika settings, the three Ellens Gesang including the "Ave Maria," the single Gretchen am Spinnrade, and the final Mignon, they have placed the very early Fantasie in D minor, a pair of reflective minuets, and the introspective Adagio in C major. Together, Zomer and Schoonderwoerd perform marvelously.

The works of Michael Praetorius (1571-1621), an outstanding composer and great innovator, have mainly come to the contemporary public's attention thanks to his collection of dances under the name of Terpsichore and to his theoretical writings. Jean-Charles Ablitzer here gives us the first recording of 10 organ pieces selected from his Musae Soniae, fantasies on Lutherian melodies) and from his Hymnodia Sonia (Latin hymns). This interpretation, already acclaimed by a 'Choc' from the Monde de la Musique, reveals Praetorius as an inspired and gentle colourist, whose musical idiom will left a deep imprint on the first generation of baroque composers.