‘Music of the Angels’ is absolutely irresistible. A delicious programme of Cello Concertos, Sonatas and Quintets by Luigi Boccherini, the title is taken from a contemporary description of the composer's work, and never has it been more aptly applied than here. Dispensing the celestial nectar is the peerless Steven Isserlis, with a stellar line-up of colleagues including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, harpsichordist Maggie Cole and fellow cellist Luise Buchberger. And the only possible way to end such a perfect album as November's Record of the Month? How else but the world's best-loved Minuet, stripped of all inauthentic accretions and sounding newly minted.

A monk's life charts the progress of a young man joining a Benedictine or Augustinian monastery in the late sixteenth century, from entering the monastery and celebrating his first Mass through to his election as Abbot, eventual death and presumed entry into heaven. Music would have been an essential component of the monastic life, and Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble present examples of repertoire which our music- and wine-loving monk might have heard, with motets by Clemens non Papa, Cipriano de Rore and others (including several lesser-known composer-monks) framing an account of Lassus's Missa super Veni in hortum meum. It is perhaps unlikely that many religious institutions of the time would have boasted such flawless singing.

A new Gimell album from The Tallis Scholars is always an event, and this year's offering is no exception: Maria plena virtute by Robert Fayrfax. One of Tudor England's finest musicians—his name heading the list of singers at the coronation of Henry VIII—Fayrfax was also a prolific composer by the standards of the day, and the four opulent votive antiphons chosen here by conductor Peter Phillips represent pinnacles of his art.

For their latest collaboration the Philharmonia Orchestra and Principal Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali turn to Shostakovich Symphonies Nos 6 & 9, the earlier work a troubled response to the cultural repression of the Soviet Union during the late 1930s, the later an enigmatic response to the closing months of World War II. Also on Signum Classics, Llŷr Williams has recorded a double album of Early and late piano works by Johannes Brahms, imaginatively interleaving the effervescent variations and third sonata of the composer's youth with his final magisterial offerings in the genre.

Benjamin Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas is among the composer's least-known scores: the present offering from the Hallé Orchestra and incoming Principal Conductor Kahchun Wong is just its second complete recording. Commissioned by Sadler's Wells Ballet in 1954, the creation of the score was not without its tribulations (‘That b. Ballet is FINISHED, & I feel as if I’ve been just let out of prison after 18 months’ hard labour’ …), but the skill with which Britten manages to bind together the episodic sequences inherent to the genre into a larger whole gives an impressive foretaste of his later operas, his virtuosic writing for full orchestra including an early—and, to contemporary critics at least, perplexing—use of Balinese gamelan.

Historical piano label APR has put together a triple album of significant interest: The earliest French piano recordings. Featuring composer-pianists Camille Saint-Saëns, Vincent d’Indy, Louis Diémer and Raoul Pugno playing their own works, as well as performances from Lucien Wurmser, Francis Planté, Gaston Régis and Aimée-Marie Roger-Miclos, some of these recordings date back well over a century, right to the very earliest days of the industry. What they may lack in terms of sound quality is more than made up for by their historical value.

That sweet city is a fascinating new album from Queen's College Choir Oxford on Signum pairing two works which received their premieres at Queen’s in the college music society’s summer concerts of 1951 and 1952. Kenneth Leighton's cantata Veris gratia—written when the composer was a Queen's undergraduate—revels in the hedonistic poetry of the medieval Carmina Burana, while Ralph Vaughan Williams's An Oxford Elegy is a late work (he was 79 when he attended the premiere) which adopts a rather more nostalgic tone in its evocation of the bucolic. Owen Rees conducts, with orchestral accompaniment from the Britten Sinfonia and narration in the Vaughan Williams from Rowan Atkinson (a further alumnus of the college).

Close Harmony from The King's Singers is a new collection of—mainly—old favourites from this group's more than illustrious first half century. All newly recorded over the last few years, these tracks—and the entertaining accompanying booklet notes—tell the story of how nothing and no one from Gioachino Rossini to Ed Sheeran is safe from 'getting the treatment' …

For her second album on Signum Classics, 2015 Leeds-winner Anna Tsybuleva has recorded the Complete Debussy Préludes—to this day landmarks of the keyboard repertoire. This is music Tsybuleva first experienced aged just five—played to her by her 'flaxen-haired' mother—and there's a resulting tenderness to these new performances which is rather special. Light Stories is an altogether more viscerally autobiographical revelation from Matthew Barley: solo cello (with occasional accompaniment both electronic and avian) and a tale of hope.

When Sir Antonio Pappano and the mighty forces of the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus gave their warmly received performances of Mendelssohn's Elijah at the Barbican in January, the engineers of LSO Live were pleasingly on-hand to capture the results. The soloists enjoying Mendelssohn's angelic flights of fancy are Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and Dame Sarah Connolly, while Allan Clayton and Gerald Finley take the roles of the duelling prophets.

Nightfall—a new album from Voces 8 and Decca Classics—offers listeners an hour of crepuscular languor, with meditative tracks from composers as diverse as Max Reger, Kerensa Briggs and Ludovico Einaudi.