There are no new Hyperion recordings this month; our September releases will be available from Friday 30 August 2024.

Harmonies of Devotion is a new Signum album from the expert voices of Contrapunctus. Their programme, devised and conducted by Owen Rees, unearths motets of the Italian Baroque preserved for posterity largely through the efforts of collectors hundreds of miles away—at the Academy of Ancient Music in eighteenth-century London. These treasures are here put into context alongside exquisite performances of more familiar works of the period.

Giacomo Meyerbeer's Le Prophète is a grand opera by any standards: its premiere (in Paris in 1849) saw the first-ever on-stage use of arc lights, the whole things lasts over three hours, and it ends with the production-designer-heart-attack-inducing stage-direction 'everything goes up in flames, the palace collapses'. Sir Mark Elder leads the London Symphony Orchestra, Lyon Opera Chorus and an extensive line-up of soloists through this complex riot of religious fanaticism set in the heart of sixteenth-century Europe, and the sound engineers of LSO Live were on hand to capture this rare recording of the complete opera.

New from Signum Classics this month we have Beethoven: The Final Sonatas, and tackling these pillars of the classical repertory is no less distinguished a figure than Melvyn Tan; a valedictory recording—Magnificat 4—with St John's College Choir Cambridge for Andrew Nethsingha made shortly before his move to Westminster Abbey and featuring a wonderfully diverse mix of settings; and a double album from the Sacconi Quartet centred around Graham Fitkin's Loosening, five new works in which the composer variously pits the familiar quartet instruments against saxophone, organ, percussion and harp.

A new release from Decca Classics brings us a debut solo recording from Aigul Akhmetshina, a coloratura mezzo with few modern equals. Boldly titled Aigul, the programme takes in flights of fancy from the pens of Massenet, Bellini and Rossini as well as from Akhmetshina's calling-card—Bizet's Carmen—and Daniele Rustioni conducts an enthusiastic Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

La Serenissima and director/violin virtuoso Adrian Chandler have recorded the intriguingly titled Vivaldi x2² which explores the wealth of concertos 'con molti istromenti' which Vivaldi created primarily for his star pupils at Venice's astonishing orphanage for girls, the 'Pietà'. On this new Signum album we have concertos for pairs of violins, oboes, recorders, flutes and cellos (both separately and in combination) and all are performed with this group's familiar infectious enthusiasm.