The partnership of Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien needs no introduction to Hyperion collectors, having been responsible over the last sixteen years for authoritative readings of much of the major repertoire for violin and piano. February's Record of the Month is their latest collaboration, bringing compelling accounts of the three Schumann Violin Sonatas—passionate, intense works inspired by the calibre of musicians with whom Schumann associated in the early 1850s. But however distinguished those early performances by Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann may have been, it's difficult to imagine they could have surpassed these: this is a duo which can always be relied upon to produce rather special results.

If the Italian piano concerto is an elusive creature, largely absent from the standard repertoire, in War Silence – Rare Italian piano concertos pianist Roberto Prosseda helps redress such neglect in a programme consisting of no fewer than four of them. Written between 1900 and 2015, works by Guido Alberto Fano, Luigi Dallapiccola, Silvio Omizzolo and Cristian Carrara (whose concerto gives the album its arresting title) will be new to most listeners: two are first recordings and all are worth discovering in such committed performances as they receive here. The London Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Nir Kabaretti. With Guillaume de Machaut: A lover's death The Orlando Consort concludes its magisterial survey of the secular music of France's great fourteenth-century composer-poet, a survey which has greatly enhanced our understanding and appreciation of an extraordinary figure. The themes of this final instalment are familiar—the fleeting joys and lasting sorrows of courtly love, and the narrator's near obsession with his lover, the desire for whom 'Love in my heart has set ablaze / And stoked' (to quote the vigorous opening motet).