The personnel may have changed over the years but the musical standards remain reassuringly high: currently celebrating its sixtieth anniversary season, The Nash Ensemble here delivers perfectly judged accounts of Debussy's String Quartet & Sonatas. Besides that early quartet and the three sonatas which date from the composer's final years, the programme also includes a rare outing for David Walter's chamber ensemble arrangement of the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Scored for twelve players (single strings and winds, plus harp and crotales), this is an idiomatic version which loses none of the mystery and languor of the orchestral original. This album again demonstrates the truth of The Sunday Times's evaluation of the Nash—'chamber music royalty'.

When the top-selling albums of a single artist are Joseph Haydn and Nikolai Kapustin (in that order, but only just), it can mean only one thing: this month we celebrate the extraordinary recordings of Hyperion titan Marc-André Hamelin, now entering his fourth decade with the label. Few pianists have so rich and varied a discography, few pianists so reliably have the critics reduced to helpless hyperbole (‘jaw-dropping’ … ‘breathtakingly brilliant’ …), and few artists of any sort are so unassuming in the face of incontrovertible genius. Marc, you are an absolute pleasure to work with, an A & R Manager’s dream (‘Never heard of it … Yes Please Now’), and all of us at Hyperion look forward to making many more voyages into the unknown (and not so unknown) in your company.

“My association with Hyperion Records began in November 1993, the date of my first recording session. At the time, my passion for unusual and rarely played repertoire was in full swing, and I was hungering for an outlet. I wanted to make a difference in the public’s appreciation for music that needed a champion, and I count myself so lucky that Hyperion appeared in my life!

“That first session produced Alkan and Henselt, but then it was on to a live recording from Wigmore Hall, and the complete Scriabin sonatas. Equally dear to me was the wish to record standard repertoire, and over all these years, Hyperion has given me the freedom to offer so much of the music I deeply love—Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Haydn, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and more. But the explorations have continued! And as I’ve discovered the worlds of Kapustin, Feldman and Feinberg, Hyperion has stood by me. For this, I will be unendingly grateful.

“Sixty-five albums later, there is no end in sight for me, and I’ll continue making them as long as I can. And now, it’s easier than ever for music-lovers to dive into these releases with the advent of streaming. Long live Hyperion!”

Marc’s first ten years as an exclusive Hyperion artist saw no fewer than 25 albums released. The concertos by Alkan and Henselt mentioned above were joined by those of Korngold & Marx and Ferruccio Busoni (the epic Opus XXXIX, these albums part of our on-going Romantic Piano Concerto series), and inspired pairings of Bernstein & Bolcom and Shostakovich & Shchedrin. We got the complete sonatas of both Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Medtner, extraordinary recordings devoted to Charles-Valentin Alkan and Leopold Godowsky (including the Gramophone Award-winning Complete Studies on Chopin’s Études), as well as Reger, Rzewski and Roslavets, Villa-Lobos, Grainger, Szymanowski …

Mr Hamelin’s second decade on Hyperion was no less dizzying, bringing us concertos by Rubinstein & Scharwenka (what an album!), Brahms, Max Reger and Haydn, sonatas by Charles Ives & Samuel Barber, Paul Dukas, Haydn (three volumes) and Chopin, epic traversals of works by Albéniz and Busoni, more Godowsky and Alkan, chamber collaborations with the Leopold String Trio for the Brahms Piano Quartets and the Takács Quartet for the Schumann Piano Quintet, and trips to realms altogether more jazzy with works by Kapustin, Hamelin himself and others …

More recently we’ve been delighted by recordings from Marc which have taken us from Mozart to Samuil Feinberg, and from Debussy to Morton Feldman. There have been further collaborations with the Takács Quartet for piano quintets by Shostakovich, César Franck and Ernő Dohnányi, the Pacifica Quartet for that of enfant terrible Leo Ornstein, and with Leif Ove Andsnes for a four-handed battle with Stravinsky. And the sheer breadth of repertoire continues to astonish, recent consecutive albums covering Sonatas by C P E Bach, the Complete Rags of William Bolcom, Fauré’s Nocturnes & Barcarolles, New Piano Works by Hamelin, and—as if that were not enough—Beethoven’s Hammerklavier … There’s a lot to choose from! We’ve included a generous—if entirely subjective—selection of personal favourite tracks on this month’s sampler, which is as ever free to download. Enjoy!

This year celebrating their twentieth anniversary, polyphony specialists Stile Antico have recorded what is perhaps surprisingly their first album dedicated to the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Centred on the glorious Missa Papae Marcelli, this third instalment in the group’s ‘Golden Renaissance’ series for Decca Classics includes several of Palestrina’s most perfect motets, as well as a twelve-part, three-choir setting of Laudate Dominum in tympanis.

LSO Live immerses itself this month in the carnal excesses of inter-War Europe with a visceral recording of Kurt Weill’s Die sieben Todsünden. Soprano Magdalena Kožená plays the unfortunate Anna (charged with earning money for her feckless family, and by whatever means), while the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle throw everything they have at this centrepiece of an all-Weill programme.

Alone together from the male-voice masters of Minnesota-based Cantus takes as its theme a very modern problem: the more ‘connected’ our world becomes, the more isolated its citizens perceive themselves to be. The resulting album on Signum Classics is one of introspection and beauty, with music from a broad church (including a rare segue from Beethoven to Paul Simon) laying down a comfort blanket of opulent harmony.

The inaugural release of 2025 from Signum Classics sees the intrepid Armonico Consort and director Christopher Monks continue their exploration of a composer all-but forgotten with Francesco Scarlatti's Il Daniele nel lago de' leoni. Brother of Alessandro and uncle of Domenico, Francesco died in obscurity in Dublin some time around 1741. His sole oratorio tells the story of the Prophet Daniel in the den of lions, and appears never to have been performed during the composer's lifetime, receiving its probable premiere just last year following the discovery of the autograph manuscript in a Cambridge library.