Decca’s “dashing tenor, the king of the bel canto repertory” (New York Times) Juan Diego Flórez has over 15 years become the lyric tenor of choice among cognoscenti, colouring his notes like an artist does a canvas.

It was in these terms that Ferruccio Busoni greeted the publication in 1908 of the 14 Bagatelles, in which Béla Bartók conveyed the violent aesthetic impact of his discovery of authentic Hungarian peasant music. Over the next 20 years, up to the magisterial Sonata of 1926, he indefatigably refined an innovative pianistic language: pungent, dissonant, percussive, with multiple new playing techniques, that was to influence the entire 20th century. A master of every style, from Haydn to Boulez by way of Chopin and Chabrier, Alain Planès stands revealed here as a Bartókian of the front rank.

The first-ever soundboard recordings to surface from the ‘77 tour offer a trove significant performances from this under-documented transitional era, including early prototypes of “Something In The Night,” “Rendezvous” and “The Promise”; the unreleased original “Action In The Streets” featuring the Miami Horns; and a mesmerizing expanded version of “Backstreets.”

On the eve of his centenary in 2018, Sony Classical releases the most important collection, Leonard Bernstein’s classic American Columbia recordings, remastered from their original 2- and multi-track analogue tapes. This has allowed for the creation of a natural balance (for example, between the orchestra and solo instruments) that brings the quality of these half-century-old recordings, excellent for their time, up to the standards of today’s audiophiles. In addition, there has been a meticulous restoration of some earlier masterings in which LP surface noise was too rigorously eliminated at the expense of the original brilliance.