Latin, jazz, pop and rhythm and blues accents fuse this third album by guitarist/composer and arranger Ray Obeido. Contributions from a seasoned cast of players include Kenny Kirkland, Andy Narell, Louis Conte, Dave Garibaldi and many others. It's guitar playing that will give you a fresh outlook of what this instrument can do.

A host of accomplished conductors including Daniel Harding, Daniele Gatti, Bernard Haitink and Eliahu Inbal lead the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in these performances of Mahler's Symphonies Nos. 1-10. Recorded in Amsterdam over two seasons in 2010/11, the collection also includes 'Das Lied von der Erde'.

Hirundo Maris is Latin for “sea swallow” and, like that bird’s flight, harpist Arianna Savall’s quintet – part early music ensemble, part folk group – drifts on musical currents between Norway and Catalonia, and adds its own songs, created on the wing. Savall and co-leader Petter Udland Johansen have shaped a band with a bright, glistening timbral blend, capped by Arianna’s ice-clear voice, well-equipped to address songs of the north and the south.

Bassist Arild Andersen's epic Nordic folk and jazz fusion, with Nana Vasconcelos on percussion, Kirsten Brеten Berg on vocal, munnharpe, langeleik, Bendik Hofseth on tenor and soprano saxophones and guests Bugge Wesseltoft (voice) and Paolo Vinaccia (percussion). It's austere, sparse beauty offers a haunting sound, and gives Braten Berg an perfect platform for her voice. The moods shift constantly from cool Nordic jazz to warm Brazilian rhythms, then overlaps them in something completely original and yet somehow welcoming and familiar. Recorded in 1993, this was his final recording for KKV before moving into the ECM stable.

Sagn was the result of a commission for the 1990 Vossajazz festival that sealed the collaborative spirits of singer Kirsten Bråten Berg and bassist Arild Andersen. Blending folk songs from their native Norway, along with jazz and rock elements, the two shared the stage with percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, saxophonist Bendik Hofseth, pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, and guitarist Frode Alnæs. While we don’t have (so far as I’m aware) a live recording of what was surely an historic occasion, we do have this ECM studio rendition, buffed and polished to a mirror’s shine. Sagn is a massive effort, one of ECM’s fullest on a single disc, and stands as Andersen’s most personal statement to date.

Since no others leap to mind, I would have to say that Joao Bosco is the greatest civil engineer turned singer/songwriter in the history of Brazilian popular music. He graduated with his degree in 1972 but since then has been concentrating on becoming one of Brazil's most formidable songwriters. For most of his early career he supplied Elis Regina with some of her best material, indeed it could be said that each one made the other's career, but since her death, Bosco has stepped into the performance limelight with a great degree of authority and has been one of the more compelling figures in Brazilian music for the last 25 years.

This limited edition box set includes 35 sonic spectacular albums from the early golden age of digital when Decca’s engineers created a new DECCA SOUND. This set is a celebration of the nearly 25-year partnership between conductor Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Highlights include recordings of Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, Bizet, Respighi, Stravinsky, Holst, Debussy and much more.

From the outset of his recording career, Maurizio Pollini has championed modern music – in benchmark accounts of Bartók, Boulez, Manzoni, Nono, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern, to which can be added his later recordings of Debussy and Berg. Here are his complete recordings of 20th-century music, brought together on a specially-priced 6-CD set for the first time.

The bayan is a Russian accordion with a distinctively Eastern European timbre that Gubaidulina has featured in several of her works. Her idiomatic writing for the instrument exploits its coloristic and expressive range as both a melodic and harmonic instrument. In Fachwerk for bayan, percussion, and strings, she uses the percussion with great subtlety as a member of the accompanying forces to provide color and a rhythmic and dynamic foundation for the strings, rather than falling into the temptation of exploiting its potential for taking center stage.

A unique and underrated band that specialized in soul, funk and jazz fusion, Seawind enjoyed a small following in the late 1970s and early '80s, but was never as well known as it deserved to be. Uniting material from the Hawaiian outfit's first two albums, Seawind (1977) and Window of a Child (1978), with five previously unreleased songs from 1981, this CD (released in 1995) shows how much this Hawaiian band and its expressive lead singer Pauline Wilson had going for them.