Laurence Perkins is not only an extremely accomplished bassoonist, he also has the enviable talent of devising memorable and attractive programmes (and album titles) for his instrument. Honey-coloured cow—his latest release, and a deserved Record of the Month for May—charmingly delivers on all fronts. Perkins’s bassoon expressively sings throughout an album covering a century of music, and if the occasional porcine grunt or plaintive moo intrudes—for example near the end of the Ruth Gipps piece which gives the album its title—humour is just one element in a programme exploring a wide range of moods, styles and accompanying forces, with contributions from harp, piano (John Flinders), string quartet, bassoon ensembles, and string orchestra (the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Goodchild). Something to gladden the hearts of moosic-lovers everywhere.

Composer and works may be unfamiliar, but Viktor Kalabis: Duettina, Chamber music & Diptych is very much the sort of repertoire in which Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica (to both of whom Hyperion extends the warmest of welcomes) specialize. All three works—for varying numbers of strings—date from the second half of the twentieth century, and if the influence of figures such as Martinů, Bartók and Berg may be heard in the background, that isn’t to deny the individuality of Kalabis’s own compositional voice, a voice which emerges as determinedly, defiantly tonal. This is a powerful album which will repay repeated listening as well as introducing a wider audience to a lesser-known Czech composer.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring must be one of the most-recorded of all ballet scores. Here Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in a performance which fully engages with this explosive score.

For Decca Classics, pianist Benjamin Grosvenor has recorded Chopin Piano Sonatas Nos 2 & 3, two of this composer’s most profound and contrasting works. Grosvenor recorded the two concertos back in 2019 (‘the kind of disc that makes you rethink these works and appreciate them all over again’—Gramophone), and this new album also includes the mighty Ballade No 1, the Op 57 Berceuse, and the Op 55 Nocturnes.

For Signum Classics, the viol masters of Fretwork have recorded an intriguing programme pairing Gibbons Fantasias & ‘My days’ by Nico Muhly. The Elizabethan master’s six six-part Fantasias—jewels in an elaborate crown—are presented complete, while for Nico Muhly’s contemporary response (a ‘ritualized memory piece about Orlando Gibbons’) the instrumentalists are sinuously joined by vocal quartet Iestyn Davies, Samuel Boden, Hugo Hymas and Jimmy Holliday.

Yunchan Lim’s recording of the Chopin Études on Decca Classics held its own in the Top 10 of the UK Classical Charts for a good chunk of 2024. Now we get to hear the performance which catapulted this Korean prodigy into the international piano stratosphere in the first place: Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3, recorded with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and an astonished Marin Alsop. This performance was captured at the final of the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and in front of a live audience, an audience clearly so captivated by this extraordinary pianist that you could hear a mouse drop a pin—till tumultuous applause engulfs the hall and the dying final chord.

Lament & Liberation is an ambitious new recording from St John’s College Choir Cambridge. Their programme—devised by in-coming Director of Music Christopher Gray—is unashamedly ‘not for the faint-hearted’: Sir James MacMillan’s Cantos sagrados triptych of 1989 is joined by new works (specially composed for St John’s) by Joanna Marsh, Helena Paish and Martin Baker, the whole bookended by the relative tranquillity of Roxanna Panufnik and Dobrinka Tabakova. Also on Signum Classics, Life by Oliver Davis is a tenth collection of this composer’s balletic inspirations, here focusing on works for violin (Kerenza Peacock and Benjamin Baker) and/or piano (Huw Watkins) with orchestra (the Royal Philharmonic).

A new recording from Decca Classics brings us a programme featuring a Cello Concerto & Cello Sonatas by Shostakovich & Britten. The concerto in question is Shostakovich’s No 2 in G major and it is performed by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and the Sinfonia of London under the baton of John Wilson. Then to complete the programme we have two cello sonatas: those of Shostakovich (dating from 1934, and a work which marked a turn towards more classical forms in the composer’s output) and Benjamin Britten (written shortly after he shared a box with Shostakovich at London’s Royal Festival Hall for the UK premiere of the Russian’s Cello Concerto No 1). Isata Kanneh-Mason is at the piano for these seminal works of the cello-and-piano repertoire.

Sir Edward Elgar’s The Kingdom remains something of a poor relation among the composer’s dramatic works—outshone by his two earlier oratorios, The Apostles and Gerontius—but as this new recording from Signum Classics amply shows, such preconceptions are perhaps unjust, and this despite the work never officially being completed. Soloists Francesca Chiejina, Dame Sarah Connolly, Benjamin Hulett and Ashley Riches are here ably supported by the Crouch End Festival Chorus and London Mozart Players, David Temple conducting a performance very much from the heart.

Sir Simon Rattle continues a glorious cycle on LSO Live with a new rendition of Janáček’s Jenůfa. With principal soloists Agneta Eichenholz, Katarina Karnéus, Nicky Spence and Aleš Briscein, the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, this epic re-telling of Gabriela Preissová’s Her Stepdaughter occupied its composer for ten gruelling years, the result a miraculous combination of tragic power and lyrical ardour.

French School pianists play French Concertos—an important new set from APR, the historical piano label—draws together twelve pianistic titans of the years 1930-1949 in performances, most of them premieres, of concertos by Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Widor, Poulenc and more.