Fred Hersch is an American jazz pianist and educator. He has performed solo and led his own groups, including the Pocket Orchestra consisting of piano, trumpet, voice, and percussion. He was the first person to play weeklong engagements as a solo pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York City. He has recorded more than 70 of his jazz compositions. Hersch has been nominated for several Grammy Awards. This compilation of celebrated pianist's best-loved recordings for Chesky culls material from three discs-1991's Forward Motion, 1993's Dancing in the Dark and 1994's The Fred Hersch Trio Plays.

As the last of the great Romantic symphonic composers, Rachmaninoff represents the bridge between 19th-century romanticism and modern times. His fabulous orchestrations generate lush sonorities and grandeur, in a style of overwhelming expression that fascinates the listener to this day. His 2nd piano concerto is a musical psychodrama, as the young composer describes the healing of profound mental depression.

On Friday 15 October 2021, Canto will be released, the second album of the collective for new music Big Bang (on the photo together with recording producer Frerik De Jong).

This recording includes an excellent selection from Beethoven’s many settings of Irish folksongs, with imaginative new arrangements of his accompaniments, rescored for more traditional instruments than the original piano, violin and cello.

Born in Nagoya in Japan, Etsuko Hirose began studying the piano at the age of three. When she was six she performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.26 with an orchestra. After pursuing her studies at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris and at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in the class of Bruno Rigutto and Nicholas Angelich, she has received the guidance of Alfred Brendel, Marie-Francoise Bucquet and Jorge Chamine.

The first monographic recording entirely dedicated to Francesco Rasi is released for the 400th anniversary of his death (30 November 1621). The first interpreter of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, an astonishing tenor and poet with a life studded with triumphs, constant travels, debts and murders, this native of Arezzo was fought over by all the courts of Italy and Europe.

Julien Chauvin and Le Concert de la Loge join Alpha and launch a new cycle devoted to Mozart. This project is a natural continuation of Julien Chauvin’s work of rediscovery focusing on the interpretation of the music of Haydn and his contemporaries in Paris in the late eighteenth century.

Marin Marais published his Quatrième Livre de Pièces de Viole two years after the death of Louis XIV, establishing himself as the undisputed master of the genre and providing pieces not only for musicians who had achieved some skill on the viol but also for the most virtuoso players. Here Marais reshaped the classical forms, altering the traditional sequence for the suites and making an increasing use of character pieces.

Twelve Sibyls, ancient psychics, became during the Middle-Ages the counterpoints of the Prophets, announcing since the beginning of time (2nd-7th centuries) the arrival of a child who will become the Savior of the World. The emergence of those characters and of these strange and mysterious texts resulted of the fascination the Renaissance resolutely showed towards Antiquity.

The great “composer of the millennium” Johann Sebastian Bach stands like a solitary rock in the landscape of music history. There is less talk about where he came from and what influenced him stylistically. Chorwerk Ruhr embarked on a search for clues with highly interesting results: the young Johann Sebastian also listened to and studied works that were already around 100 years old.

Audax Records presents the second album by the Guatemalan soprano Adriana González (winner of Operalia 2019) and the Basque pianist Iñaki Encina Oyón. One can again take delight in a discovery: the complete recording of the songs of Isaac Albéniz. Following the chronological order of the compositions, the duo traces the short, but varied life of the most important Spanish composer and waymarker toward the twentieth century.

Al Jarreau finally found success in the U.S. after 1975's We Got By. The later albums that followed ,like 1977's live Look to the Rainbow and 1978's All Fly Home found him attaining the all-important cult status and accolades from the jazz community. Those facts made his switch to pop/R&B on This Time even more surprising…

Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio is a 1954 studio album by Lester Young, accompanied by Oscar Peterson's working trio of the time (featuring Ray Brown and Barney Kessel), plus drummer J. C. Heard.

Los Norte Americanos present Tijuana Bach, a project combining the sound of Mexico with the mastery of JS Bach. This collection comes courtesy of Countdown Media's restoration of the master tapes from renowned legacy label, Ashire/Somerset.