When, in April 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed Thomaskantor in Leipzig (organist and choirmaster at St Thomas's Church), he became the latest in a long line of musicians to hold one of the most important musical posts in central Germany of the time.

Written five years after Britten's famous setting, Howells's interpretation of 'A New Year Carol' abandons the stately sweet unison melody in favour of a 'Joyous' arrangement for two-part chorus, here showcased beautifully by Ikon and David Hill. Happy New Year! 🎉

Premiering soon! Howells's 'Joyous' interpretation of 'A New Year Carol'. Join us on YouTube at 12pm (GMT) on 30th December (and hit the button now for a reminder) 🎞️ youtu.be/UbY-vr78TbI?...

If Mozart had been living and working in 18th-century Rio de Janeiro, might his music have sounded like this?

A northern English town loses its best choral singers to fighting in World War I but finds new hope in a time of loss through music in Nicholas Hytner's new film "The Choral," featuring Ralph Fiennes. n.pr/496WPiy

Wishing a most wonderful birthday to the sensational Steven Isserlis 🎉 📷 Jean-Baptiste Millot

One of the prevailing characteristics of Vasks' music is its sheer beauty of sound, and his Violin Concerto 'Distant Light' pulls no punches. In the clip, Anthony Marwood and Det Norske Kammerorkester snap the piece's second cadenza to a close, as the basses begin another poignant elegy ✨

The Christmas tree has been lit, and a fantastical children's party is about to begin 🎄 Andrey Gugnin brings festive magic, excitement and grandeur to the opening proceedings of Pletnev's 'Nutcracker' piano transcription.

"'I'll take it!' said Ted Perry, Hyperion's managing director, over the telephone. 'But you haven't heard it yet!' I exclaimed. 'I don't need to—I know it will be good', was his reply. 'But only if you agree to record the complete Bach.' My dream had just come true."— @angejsb.bsky.social

Sir John Rutter celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year (we at Hyperion wish him very many more) and so it's only appropriate to include one of Hyperion's albums dedicated exclusively to Rutter's music on our list of Christmas favourites.

Lopes-Graça wrote the works included on this new recording by Luís Duarte in the 1950s when he worked extensively on traditional music. As the name shows, the 'Glosas' are music over music.

This traditional English Christmas carol needs no introduction, and there are few choirs around today who can sprinkle it with the unbridled tinsel-bedecked excellence that Trinity Cambridge can. Stephen Layton and his expert singers capture the joyful spirit in buckets 🎄

Enormous congratulations to Marc-André Hamlin for making @npr.org’s Top 25 Songs of the Year list with his recording of John Oswald's fascinating multiplicity of quotes from the classical, jazz and pop canons, 'Tip' 👏👏👏

A quite delightful addition to your regular seasonal listening from The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, recorded in the Trinity College Chapel. Watch now on YouTube 🎞️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmsp...

Robert Schumann's 'Sängers Trost' ('The poet's comfort') is the first of a set of five lieder, Op 127, here arranged by Steven Isserlis for cello and piano.

Gently lyrical and puckishly humorous, Beethoven's Piano Sonata in G major, Op 14 No 2, is the antithesis of the tumultuous 'Pathétique'. Here, in the bucolic scherzo-cum-finale, the main theme cavorts impishly across the bar lines as Pavel Kolesnikov weaves his magic 🪄

The idiosyncratic spelling of the album title—'caroll', not 'carol'—is deliberate, taken from the 17th-century poem by Robert Herrick as set by Kenneth Leighton in 1953.

Composer, pianist, conductor, lecturer, ethnomusicologist, political campaigner … over a long and productive life Fernando Lopes-Graça pursued a wide range of activities, by no means all necessarily associated with the esoteric world of mid-twentieth-century European modernism.

Czerny once described Beethoven's 'Appassionata' as 'the most perfect execution of a mighty and colossal plan', and it remained the composer's own favourite piano sonata until his Op 106. Andrey Gugnin's exquisite touch brings to life this performance from 2015 🥀

The shadowy scherzo of Britten's Cello Symphony is a technical tour de force which, in spite of its rigorously intellectual construction, has an unparalleled eeriness and intensity. Alban Gerhardt's performance in this clip is from 2013, with the RTVE Madrid and Carlos Kalmar 🎻

It was the Huddersfield Choral Society which made the first complete recording of 'Gerontius' on 8-12 April 1945; this latest chapter in the Society's ties to the work was recorded 80 years later, virtually to the day, on 5 April 2025.

For your diaries; @mahanesfahani.bsky.social visits the Southbank Centre to bring to life a programme of music by some of the English Renaissance's greatest composers, on 3rd December 🎟️ www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/mah...

A rollercoaster ride through works by some of the twentieth century's great musical mavericks, including John Oswald's 'Tip'. But how many of the forty-odd musical references can you name? Watch the interview 🎞️ youtu.be/Z1htOg5h7Zc?...

For his Hyperion debut, pianist Luís Duarte has chosen a selection of works by one of the major figures in twentieth-century Portuguese music—Fernando Lopes-Graça—exploring a wide range of styles, moods and influences.

The stirring finale to the first half of Elgar's choral masterpiece 'The Dream of Gerontius' marks the culminating moment in which the priest releases the soul from this world and sets it on its journey to the next.

Composed on vacation in 1924, Bloch's 'From Jewish Life' for cello and piano explores the entire range of the solo instrument. This performance of outstanding composure and poise from Natalie Klein and Yeol Eum Son at Wigmore Hall is utterly spellbinding 🪄

Big shout out to this month's Gramophone Magazine cover star, Marc-André Hamelin, on the thrill of adventure and discovery, not for the faint of heart! 🎹

In 1865, Georges Bizet wrote six piano pieces under the title 'Chants du Rhin' for the publisher Heugel. The music grows in sophistication with each piece, starting with 'L'aurore', the dawn, described with effortless simplicity as a long, pure melody.

Published in 1915, the rousing 'O thou, the central orb' sets words by the Oxford clergyman and hymnologist Henry Ramsden Bramley, who wrote his Petrarchian sonnet so it could be used as a new text for Orlando Gibbons's 1619 anthem 'O all true faithful hearts'.

'In two words, it's bad.' The grumbling note which accompanied 'Rêverie' made clear the composer's feelings, but the piece was published anyway. Debussy needn't have worried though: the work's opening notes set the scene for a dreamlike musical world 💭

This ballade 'in a Bohemian style' for cello and piano harks back to the composer's Jewish roots, although at the time of composition Moscheles was a musical court favourite of Queen Victoria in London. With its high-spirited alternation of mood and speeds it can be seen as a cheerful 'dumka'.

"We have been blessed to have in our midst for many decades the fascinatingly lyrical voice of Yehudi Wyner, now in his mid-nineties."

The latest solo album from Marc-André Hamelin promises a rollercoaster ride through works by some of the twentieth century's great musical mavericks, including Hamelin's own fast and furious 'Hexensabbat'. Not for the faint-hearted …

Over a hushed chorale for full choir, rich in added notes, curlicues of melody from two solo sopranos drift across the soundscape. The effect is quietly ecstatic, as the inimitable Trinity College Choir perform 'O salutaris hostia', by composer Ēriks Ešenvalds back in 2015 ✨

"A very simple string of expanding intervals, as well as eleven other series derived from it, is all Stefan Wolpe needed to build the monolithic edifice that is his 'Passacaglia'."

"'The perilous night' is Cage's first important work for prepared piano. It was written in a time of great personal turmoil, and it expresses the despair he felt before separating from his wife Xenia, whom he had married in 1935."

Someone get that man a drink! 🥃 A fantastical passage of sheer sonority brings Scriabin's vibrating Piano Sonata No 5 to its unorthodox close, performed unmistakably, of course, by Marc-André Hamelin.

Benefiting from 'stunningly precise fingerwork' (BBC Record Review), the virtuoso piano transcriptions on Andrey Gugnin's new album of Russian ballet suites take the listener on a thrilling ride through four nineteenth- and twentieth-century favourite ballet scores.

"'Stuck on Stella' dates from 1979 and, in the composer's own words, it was written mostly to please. Martirano recalls being influenced by Carl Maria von Weber's 'Konzertstück' for piano and orchestra as well as by a passage from Dante's 'Divine Comedy'."

'Expectans expectavi' is the high-water mark of Wood's Romantic church music. Its intense, yearning diatonic language, epitomized by the opening wistful lyricism of the organ, the rich dominant-thirteenth harmony and the plaintive opening for the choir, is deeply memorable.

The first single from Luís Duarte's album dedicated to Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça: a beguiling but somewhat sorrowful 'Romance of Santa Iria of Mação', one of 11 'Glosses' on traditional Portuguese songs.

Dvořák conjures theme after theme of ravishing beauty in the finale of his beloved Cello Concerto in B minor, here performed with an expressive panache characteristic of Steven Isserlis, alongside the Berliner Philharmoniker and Alan Gilbert 🎻

"My own piece is called 'Hexensabbat', which roughly translates as 'witches sabbath'. It ended up being probably the most violent piece I've ever written, especially the ending. We just finished recording it a couple of hours ago, and, it was FUN!"—Marc-André Hamelin

"The less said about my own 'Hexensabbat' the better. (While practising it, I sometimes wished I could avail myself of some potion from a bubbling cauldron to help me play it better!) And for the very ending, the horror of it, I make no apologies."—Marc-André Hamelin

Like a magician with a piano, Stephen Hough is spellbinding in this wonderful excerpt from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3 with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, back in 1993 🪄

"And for the very ending, the horror of it, I make no apologies."—Marc-André Hamelin Coming soon … 👀

Oh wow! Hamelin is one of our most virtuosic pianists and the idea of him taking on some of Zappa's knottiest music is too intriguing to resist.

"'Ruth is sleeping' began life as a purely electronic creation. In 1993, when organising the legendary Yellow Shark concert(s) for the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Zappa asked Ali N Askin to arrange the work for two pianists to play, either at one or two pianos."

'Sine nomine' was written for two soloists, a chorus and an orchestra for the 1922 Three Choirs Festival at the suggestion of Edward Elgar. In Farrington’s arrangement, this orchestral rhapsody transforms into a chamber work, achieving a new-found intimacy.

For many listeners, Herbert Howells's choral output will always be associated with his sizeable and significant contribution to the Anglican tradition, but his settings of secular texts should not be overlooked.