Three composers and three lyrically affecting piano concertos make for an outstanding Record of the Month in March. Hyperion's ever-popular Romantic Piano Concerto series may here have reached its biblical three score and ten but remains very much in its prime, volume 70 celebrating the achievements of three women composers with Piano Concertos by Beach, Chaminade and Howell. All are works—and composers—deserving of much wider exposure, and all receive committed advocacy from soloist Danny Driver, conductor Rebecca Miller (making her Hyperion debut) and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. More twentieth-century piano writing—of greater astringency—comes courtesy of Cédric Tiberghien (and friends) with a sensational performance of the Bartók Sonata for two pianos and percussion; music which epitomizes composer and performers at their forceful best and which provides a terrific conclusion to this highly praised mini series.

Travelling back some seven centuries, The Orlando Consort pays homage to the rise of early English polyphony in Beneath the northern star, a fascinating programme which showcases the wide range of music originating from this ‘silver stone set in the silver sea’ over the course of nearly two hundred years. Piers Lane and the Goldner String Quartet continue to demonstrate their consummate mastery of the Romantic repertoire with an irresistible programme of Borodin Piano Quintet & String Quartet No 2.

On LSO Live this month we have a new release in Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Romantics series with the London Symphony Orchestra. Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream is presented in a heavenly new suite of Sir John's own devising for three actors, choir and orchestra.

Choral glories from Signum Classics aplenty: Virgin and Child is the second in Owen Rees's exploration of the Baldwin Partbooks—works by Fayrfax, Sheppard, Tallis, Taverner and White gloriously sung by Contrapunctus. From Gallicantus and director Gabriel Crouch Queen Mary's Big Belly presents a putative musical narration of emotions, both at court and in the country at large, as England's hopes for a Catholic heir to the throne were gradually dashed.

The latest Signum recording from Jesus College Choir Cambridge enterprisingly interweaves choral works by Byrd & Britten into a thoroughly pleasing whole. Mark Williams once more conducts. Anthem, subtitled 'Great British Hymns and Choral Works', is a tribute from the national treasure that is the Huddersfield Choral Society to a musical heritage that spans the best part of two centuries.

Thomas Adès remains a force pretty much unique in British contemporary music. Here for LSO Live he conducts a responsive London Symphony Orchestra in four of his own devastatingly powerful orchestral works: Asyla, Tevot, Polaris & Brahms.

The Nielsen Flute & Clarinet Concertos are among the most popular of his works. Challenging but ever approachable, they receive here on Signum Classics performances of typical flair from the Philharmonia Orchestra under Paavo Järvi.

A New Heaven is the latest Signum release from Queen's College Choir Oxford. Director Owen Rees has devised a highly charged programme of choral works traversing the gamut of human responses to divine prophecy of the apocalypse. Tread carefully. Handel in Ireland follows Bridget Cunningham and her harpsichord to Dublin as Georg Frideric sought ever more ingenious new markets in the city that was to become the birthplace of the Messiah.