On their tenth studio album, the 1991 originating band Fools Garden, presents themselves as very mature and versatile. Their current album Rise and Fall offers a variety of songs, which not only show themselves very independently, but also maintain classic-timeless qualities in composition, interpretation and arrangement. This time we let a very special discipline prevail in writing the songs, says singer Peter Freudenthaler.

Musical works of genius are sometimes approached as museum exhibits, and the controversies concerning interpretative freedom can even be more fierce than Scheibe’s famous polemic with Bach’s advocate Birnbaum. Full of respect for the Composer’s artistic ideas as I am, I try to understand his music in the context of a time when improvisation was universally practised. The wealth, complexity and refinement of the notation make this task more difficult, but important clues are provided by the study of versions that usually differ in these very aspects, namely – texture and ornamentation.

If you ask Noah to describe his music, he would rather sit down at the piano and let the sound speak for itself. “One is able to tell an entire story just by playing a single note, if it is played with sincerity. You create a space and within that space, music is formed.” His first album titled “Universe”, released by Munich Records, a division of V2 Records Benelux, stems from that very same sincerity. Every composition is born out of love for improvisation and a long-standing passion for music. “I have been composing my own music since I was a child and it feels like I have been working towards this album ever since. This album was destined to happen.”

This album lives up to the promise of its title: it is hot, appealing and enlivening. “Mocca Swing” is a retrospective of the musical creativity of Mulo Francel. It documents his role as a passionate builder of bridges between young and old, one’s home country and abroad, and between jazz and other music genres.

In a period in which the boundaries between musical genres are rapidly dissolving, there still exist major differences between what we still call a “jazz” band and those of other musical classifications.Perhaps the most significant of these is that longevity in a jazz ensemble will nearly always have an entirely positive effect on the music. That’s clearly a huge factor when listening to the high-caliber international quartet put together over a decade ago by the New York-based guitarist-composer Scott DuBois.

Many songs on this album have one thing in common: they are mainly early compositions, in some cases even the first songs these composers wrote. They all have a certain spontaneity and freshness which shows that the young men who composed them were still at the beginning of their careers, full of dreams and hopes for the future. Thus, not surprisingly, many of the songs are also about dreams, totally in the spirit of the true romantic soul.

The present recording constitutes more than just a new version of the Vespers. It is the first recording of the Vespers in the alternative version proposed by the composer, without concertato instruments. It reveals the underlying matrix of the work we all know, the ‘original version’ to which Monteverdi added concertato instruments for use in large-scale performances. Respecting the structure of the Office of Vespers, Ludus Modalis has chosen to frame the psalms with the antiphons corresponding to a Marian ceremony.

The great inventor and futurist Nikola Tesla, from whom the Tesla Quartet takes its name, talked of the invisible yet inseparable ties which bind people together. Through performance, teaching and outreach, the Tesla Quartet has for ten years strived to tap into this palpable feeling, using music to create meaningful connections with their audiences. Celebrating this first decade together, the quartet’s debut album draws upon the need for reflection, and to look upon the familiar in a new light.

Massimo Mercelli is the flautist in the world with the most important dedications and cooperations ; star composers as Penderecki, Gubaidulina, Glass, Nyman, Bacalov, Morricone, Galliano, Sollima wrote and/or performed with him. Massimo studied flute with the famous flautists André Jaunet and Maxence Larrieu. At just nineteen years of age, he became the principal flute at Teatro La Fenice in Venice, won the Prize Francesco Cilea, the Concorso Internazionale Giornate Musicali and the Concorso Internazionale di Stresa.

Continuing AVIE’s acclaimed and influential series of recordings of the music of Austrian émigré Hans Gál, this latest release brings together two of today’s most eminent Gál interpreters, Sarah Beth Briggs and Kenneth Woods with violin virtuoso David Juritz for a recording of Gál’s breathtakingly lyrical Piano Trio in E major and his witty Variations on a Popular Viennese Tune. Gál’s music and destiny was shaped by war and political upheaval, as was that of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Piano Trio in E minor, one of the monuments of 20th century chamber music, is a harrowing souvenir of the times in which it was written.

This new album from renowned British pianist William Howard features sixteen world premiere recordings from composers such as Judith Weir, Nico Muhly and Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. Entitled Sixteen Contemporary Love Songs, the album marks the next step in William’s two-year Love Songs project, which explores the theme of love in romantic and contemporary piano music.

We are proud and happy to announce our collaboration with the young pianist Anna Fedorova. On her debut recording with Channel Classics she shares her four favorite fantasies with us: “We all have lots of fantasies which we often love to dive into. In music - Fantasie is one of the freest genres which each composer explores in his own way and I thought it would be fascinating to dive into the fantasy world of several magnificent composers. For this particular CD I chose some of my favorite fantasies which I have been performing during the last couple of seasons.”

There is no shortage of parallels to be drawn between Caldara and Vivaldi: both Venetians, both boasting an impressive body of work running to several hundred pieces of all genres, both died in Vienna (in the same street and in the same penury!), although Caldara had written more operas and oratorios than the Red Priest. And here is one of these very 32 known oratorios, Maddalena ai piedi di Christo written in Venice around 1698; it is "oratorio volgare", that is, recited in Italian, rather than Latin.

Peruvian musician Tony Succar has gathered great artists like La India, Tito Nieves, Michael Stuart and Obie Bermudez to pay tribute to the late King of Pop through a project of his dubbed “Unity: The Latin Tribute to Michael Jackson.”

Edouard Ferlet is a jazz pianist featuring a refined swing. His album Think Bach, a first incursion into the world of the Cantor, was a total success: from Télérama (ffff) to Jazz Magazine, everyone was charmed by his approach and the quality of his piano (‘incredibly well turned out and beautiful,’ wrote Stéphane Friédérich in Pianiste)… Unclassifiable and unpredictable, as he defines himself, the pianist-composer is in the habit of combining jazz with the most varied forms: classical music, theatre, filmscores, performances and musical readings with authors such as Nancy Huston…