This is a delightful recording from a conductor more closely allied than any other to Berlioz's music. With Berlioz the devil is always in the detail; he was an extraordinary orchestrator and capable of writing unidiomatically for instruments–especially the woodwinds–in order to get exactly the sound he wanted. Or rather, sounds, for the whole texture is made up of many layers. Davis understands this as if by instinct, and draws some beautiful playing from the instrumentalists without ever losing sight of the whole picture. It has been said that the French style of phrasing is all foreplay and no climax: the singers bring this teasing quality to their long, flowing lines but with a charmingly English home-counties blush too. Elsie Moris's light tone is a perfect match for Peter Pears' cool, silvery voice in this respect - and the choir too makes a good full sound without ever getting too heavy. The two discs also include some other gems from the pen of this most idiosyncratic of composers.

Conductor Paul Gameson directs Ex Corde Vocal Ensemble in this album of music by composer David Lancaster. These works draw upon the legacies of artists and craftsmen who lived and worked in England’s medieval York, leaving evidence of their beliefs, stories and ideas which have survived into the present, in carved stone and painted glass.

The religious Hildegard von Bingen was known as 'The Sybil of the Rhine' on account of her visions, translated into music with prophetic charisma. This disc presents two sides of Hildegard, an instrument and a mirror, reflecting her divine revelations, through the sound of her words both spoken and sung. The performances are from a specialised early-music ensemble, based in Florence, who have undertaken study of the original manuscripts and (perhaps more unusually) performed the music in public before making this testament to the art of one of music's most singular women, who is still perhaps more famed for her life than her music.

In 2018, the Styriarte Festival in Graz launched, in collaboration with Zefiro, a project to rediscover the operatic output of the Styrian composer Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), Kapellmeister at the imperial court in Vienna for forty years, with the aim of restaging six of his nineteen operas, one per year. With a cast of Baroque vocal specialists, led by Monica Piccinini and Carlotta Colombo, this set of La corona d’Arianna represents the second instalment of the Arcana series which documents the recordings made in the course of this six-year cycle, following the success of Dafne in lauro (A488, 2021 – awarded Gramophone Editor’s Choice and rated Eccezionale by Musica).

"Josquin was the most emblematic composer of his time, famous throughout Europe for his compositions both secular and sacred. This recording explores those two aspects of his output, which are more closely related than one might think. Here in a small line-up, Gli Angeli Genève deliver a virtuoso vocal performance that is sensitive and empathetic. With only two voices per part, they play on the timbre and individuality of each voice, and thus create an intimacy and a meditative mood that invite the listener to share with the singers in the deeply moving humanity of Josquin’s music."

Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most influential composers of the 14th century, and his secular love songs were as significant as his sacred masterpiece, the Messe de Nostre Dame. The Orlando Consort began its survey of Machaut's music with the 2013 album, Songs from Le Voir Dit, which was followed by The Dart of Love in 2015, and A Burning Heart in 2016, thus making Sovereign Beauty, their 2017 release on Hyperion, the fourth installment in this impressive series.

Named by The Economist as one of Twenty Living Polymaths, Sir Stephen Hough combines a worldwide career as a pianist with those of composer and writer. "My father said that I had memorised seventy nursery rhymes by the age of two. This sounds suspiciously like parental exaggeration to me, but I do know that such singing was my first form of musical expression, especially as we had no classical music in my childhood home. Then, by the age of six, the piano took over… but song remained in the background." "My first twenty years were filled with composing. Then followed almost twenty years of blank paper, writing virtually nothing except concert transcriptions for me to use as encores. Until, in my early 40s, I returned to composition with a passion…" This release celebrates Hough’s compositional output in works for choir and organ performed by the London Choral Sinfonia, with organist James Orford and conductor Michael Waldron.

Handel's Dixit Dominus HWV 232 (1707) is certainly one of the most impressive compositions of his several years in Italy. With this extremely effective piece, the only 22-year-old obviously wanted to demonstrate all of his compositional skills. Il Gardellino and Bart Van Reyn accompany him on their recording with the breathtaking cantata Il Pianto di Maria, which was long attributed to Handel until recent research has shown that it was penned by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Ferrandini (1710-1791).

What would singing be without words? When you combine wonderful poetry with exquisite music, the result is magical. In a rare break from the sacred collections they are famed for, this album from The Sixteen features a whole programme of secular music devoted to English partsongs. From Stanford’s cycle of Eight Partsongs based on the sparing yet infectious poetry of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge to Bridges’ lyrically descriptive writing in Finzi’s Seven Poems of Robert Bridges and Imogen Holst’s idyllic Six Part-Songs Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow using verses by John Keats, each setting captures the mood of the poem brilliantly.

Two opulent choral masterpieces by Richard Strauss frame an eclectic programme from one of Europe’s most highly acclaimed choirs. The name of the young Slovenian composer Matej Kastelic may still be relatively little known, but the title track Credo / I believe is simply extraordinary, and demands to be heard.

I Fagiolini’s re-discovery and recording of Striggio’s longlost Mass in 40/60 Parts was ground-breaking when it was released in 2011. The premiere recording won awards around the world including the Gramophone Early Music Award and a Diapason d’Or de l’Année in France and remains a trailblazing account of this Renaissance epic. It is complemented on this album by Tallis’s Spem in alium which it is said to have inspired. The Gramophone citation particularly mentioned the new lustre brought to the piece by instrumental involvement and the clarity brought to the detail by the use of viols, cornetts, sackbuts, dulcians and more. Eight further works by Striggio are also included, each of them premiere recordings in 2011.

Filipe de Magalhães was perhaps the most celebrated Portuguese composer of his day. Idiomatic performances from Cupertinos—‘true ambassadors of Portuguese polyphony’—will go a long way towards justifying that reputation to a modern audience.

The Yekaterinburg Philharmonic Choir (artistic director and conductor Andrei Petrenko) presents Great Music of Small Forms, an album of works by Russian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. These include works by Varlamov and Glinka as representatives of the St. Petersburg school, by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev and Cui (The Mighty Handful), and by Arensky, Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. Whilst these composers were primarily known for their large-scale compositions, here they reveal themselves as consummate masters of the choral miniature, finding their inspiration in the masterpieces of Russian poetry, in folk songs and in salon romances. Listeners will here discover not only world-famous works by these composers but also original choral arrangements of their music that were made especially for this recording.

After ‘Stravaganza d’amore’, their superb album of late sixteenth-century Florentine music, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion return to Italy, this time to Mantua. Here they offer us their reading of one of the peaks of sacred music from this period: Monteverdi’s Vespers. Revealing like no other interpreters the poignant interiority of these pieces, they bring out to the full their inherent sense of theatre. An overwhelming experience.