Any choral album conducted by David Hill is likely to prove irresistible, and especially so when the choir is constituted of some of the finest professional singers in the UK. For its Hyperion debut Ikon has devised an unusual yet rewarding programme of Herbert Howells’s Sine nomine & other secular choral works. Poems from around the British Isles, set to Howells’s typically rhapsodic melodic lines, reflect on the changing seasons and the passage of time, while reminding us of a neglected side to the composer. Iain Farrington makes a twofold contribution to some, as pianist, arranger, or both.

Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Philharmonia Orchestra have recorded Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, the mighty tone poem which caused such a furore when first performed in 1899. Orchestra and conductor have already won their spurs with this composer, Fanfare magazine describing their previous Strauss programme as ‘nothing short of a triumph’. Also from Signum Classics, Little Wanderer is an intriguing new recital album from tenor Nick Pritchard and pianist Ian Tindale. Their chosen soundworld is very much ‘Benjamin Britten’—the programme is framed by Winter Words and a selection of the folksong settings—and we have complementary songs by Imogen Holst and Daniel Kidane, whose Songs of illumination set poems by William Blake and provide the inspiration for the album title.

Two new recordings from LSO Live this month bring us three symphonies from the middle decades of the twentieth century. First up we have Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphonies Nos 5 & 9, a second RVW instalment from Chief Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra and featuring two of the composer’s most moving contributions to the genre. And then Gianandrea Noseda takes to the podium for Prokofiev’s Symphony No 4, a work whose troubled gestation reached its final form only a few years after RVW’s No 5.

In the Poet’s Garden is a treat of a new album from Sir John Rutter and The Cambridge Singers. Their all-Rutter programme opens with I’ll make me a world, an extended setting of James Weldon Johnson’s whimsical Creation narrative, 1920s Americana fantastically rendered with top-notch soloists Melanie Marshall and Roderick Williams. Three further works are included—a choral celebration of London among them—and the album comes to us from the Collegium label.

Llŷr Williams has returned to the studio for Signum Classics, and behind the unassuming title of Schumann: Piano Works, Vol. 2 lie some of the composer’s greatest works for the instrument: the first and third sonatas, Kreisleriana, Blumenstück, the Arabeske and the Études symphoniques. Performances and recorded sound immediately demand our attention: here is an understated pianist with much to say.

Simply titled and profoundly moving, Elegy is a heartfelt recital from Mary Bevan and Joseph Middleton and a meditation on that peace which can only be found through death. Encompassing works by composers from Ravel and Chausson, Brahms, Schubert and Mahler, through to Samuel Barber and Errollyn Wallen, this new album comes to us from Signum Classics.

Letters from Paris is classical guitarist Alexandra Whittingham’s first full-length album on Decca Classics, and with it she visits some of France’s most iconic musical characters. From melancholy miniatures to the soaring melodies of French chansons, this is an album which gives us the space to contemplate, marvel and hope.

New from APR—the historical piano label—we have The complete recordings of Fanny Davies & Adela Verne. Fanny Davies was a disciple of Clara Schumann and her recordings of Robert Schumann’s major works are some of the most important documents of nineteenth-century pianism to have survived (and prompted an amusing swipe from Compton Mackenzie, writing in Gramophone magazine in 1928: “Once again I must remind the recording companies that Miss Fanny Davies is alive and that she plays Schumann a great deal better than Cortot ever will”). Southampton-born Adela Verne was an active performer up till the 1950s, but her recorded legacy comprises just the four sides included here as a bonus.

The Monteverdi Choir has teamed up with customary partners The English Baroque Soloists to record a programme entitled Charpentier: Baroque Christmas for SDG. Here we have the grandest of Charpentier’s In nativitatem Domini canticum settings (he wrote four), the popular Messe de Minuit pour Noël, and eight palate-cleansing Noëls sur les instruments. Christophe Rousset conducts, while the pirouetting soloists include Samuel Boden, Ruairi Bowen and Florian Störtz.