Thierry Lancino’s background includes extensive periods of research at IRCAM and elsewhere, but his recent work concentrates on a lyrical and bold freedom of style embracing ideas of both seduction and spirituality. Inspired by a scene of historical impact, his Prelude and Death of Virgil dramatizes the demise of a daunting genius.

This recording showcases the breadth and variety of Brazilian music by focusing on composers who explore traditional styles and use native forms, such as the bossa nova, choro, frevo, and samba, combined with neo-Romanticism, Modernism and jazz. Looking beyond cultural stereotypes, it includes Camargo Guarnieri s grandly Romantic Violin Sonata No. 4 and a violin arrangement of one of Villa-Lobos s most colorful character pieces, alongside contemporary works that explore nature painting, song, and the Carnival- offering an abundance of vibrancy, dance, languorous rhythms, and joyful wit.

This isn’t the best recording of The Piano Concerto. Despite the fact that, for me at least, John Lenehan has always been the definitive Nyman pianist other than the composer himself, Stott’s interpretation has more vigour and Lawson’s more musicality. Lenehan’s performance is also muddied by the recording’s vague acoustic, a particularly telling problem for die-hard Nymaniacs who have grown up with the crisp, punchy, quasi-rock production style entirely appropriate to Nyman’s music and a trademark since his work with David Cunningham in the early 1980s.

This is a very significant historical reissue and Naxos and sound restorer Mark Obert-Thorn deserve warm thanks for bringing it back and cheap (Pearl had issued the same Dvorak in the mid-1990s, together with Feuermann's earlier recording of only the second and third movements of the Haydn Concerto under Frieder Weissmann, but it now sells at hefty prices on the marketplace, The Young Feuermann).

Ernest John Moeran was born in London but grew up in Norfolk and had strong ties with Ireland. While still a student at the Royal College of Music he was inspired by a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Norfolk Rhapsody that seemed “to breathe the very spirit of the English countryside”, and was soon collecting folksongs for himself. Moeran’s transcriptions were taken from English and Irish traditional singers with both rural and seafaring backgrounds, rescuing music and words both entertainingly earthy and sublimely beautiful which would otherwise have died with the artists who performed them.

Astor Piazzolla’s tangos, beloved around the world for their pathos, passion, longing and sensibility, are here given fresh interpretations in arrangements for piano by the Argentinean-born, Brussels-based pianist Aquiles Delle-Vigne. A disciple of Claudio Arrau and winner of the Grand Prix ‘Alberto Williams’, the most prestigious competition in South America, he has been hailed by Le Figaro as a ‘fantastic, incomparable pianist and artist’, while The New York Times characterized his playing as ‘aristocratic, sophisticated and charming’. Piazzolla’s earthy yet highly developed music gains a new dimension of intimacy but also of power in the hands of this master of the keyboard.