The debut full-length album from New York's Beau, 2016's That Thing Reality, finds the singer/songwriter duo straddling the line between introspective '60s folk and quirky, high-energy late-'70s punk. Featuring the talents of Heather Golden and Emma Jenney, Greenwich Village's Beau often sound like the long-lost daughters of punk legend Patti Smith and art-pop icon Rickie Lee Jones.

Sony Classical announces a further batch of complete recordings from the CBS/Sony and RCA Victor catalogues. The newest installment of this popular series features some unusual repertoire as well as documents of the New York Metropolitan Opera in its postwar heyday. At the Met with Richard Tucker in the early 1950s, Columbia made acclaimed recordings of Leoncavallos Pagliacci and Mascagnis Cavalleria rusticana, with Fausto Cleva conducting.

Lorenzo, the much-travelled clown, is a Venetian glass ornament belonging to the composer, Marcus Blunt. Lorenzo inspired both Blunt's work for bassoon and piano, at the heart of this disc, and a drawing by Frank Bayford, which emerged as a natural focus for a growing collection of chamber works for bassoon. The music of 'The Much-Travel'd Clown' captures the mercurial character of the bassoon: an outwardly cheerful clown who sometimes expresses an inner sadness.

Francis I, as a princely patron of the arts, realised that music was a very useful tool for his policy of prestige: official music for great diplomatic events like the amazing musical ‘tournament’ between the Chapelle of the King of France and the Chapel Royal of Henry VIII of England at the Mass for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, reconstructed in this recording.

Carnaval takes us on a journey through Robert Schumann’s life: from his passionate early piano pieces, inspired by youthful feelings of ardour, to his haunting final piano work, composed when his mind was in turmoil.

The music chosen by pianist Erato Alakiozidou for her new album, In Blue and White, represents a spiritual journey of self-discovery.

Greek pianist Erato Alakiozidou and the Lutoslawski Quartet perform works by Alfred Schnittke and Giya Kancheli, which combine the contemporary expressive vocabulary of postmodernism, with the historical narrative of the last three centuries of Western Music. Moments of amazing tension are juxtaposed with passages of fragile introspection.

Alexei Lubimov is a very great pianist and an authentically eclectic musician. Close to the music of today – he has played and recorded works by many contemporary composers and founded the Alternativa festival in Moscow, he is also impas- sioned by early instruments and Baroque music, as well as by all the music in between. This new recording stages the encounter of music of the Second Vienna School with that of the American Charles Ives. And this time, Alexei Lubimov has chosen to play on a modern instrument…

Working is the extraordinary genre-defining musical from Grammy and Academy Award winner Stephen Schwartz (Wicked; Godspell) based on Studs Terkel’s best-selling book of interviews with the American workforce. This highly original and universal portrait of the American workday is told from the perspective of those that the world so often overlooks – the schoolteacher, the housewife, the fireman and the waitress amongst many – whose daily grind and aspirations reflect the truths of the people that make up a nation.