For his Hyperion debut, pianist Luís Duarte has chosen a selection of works by one of the major figures in twentieth-century Portuguese music. Most of the music in Glosas & other piano works by Fernando Lopes-Graça may date from a single decade—the 1950s—but it explores a wide range of styles, moods and influences, from the opening set of Glosas, ‘glosses’ on eleven traditional Portuguese songs (folk music exerted a powerful influence on Lopes-Graça throughout his life); through five graceful Lullabies, three of which are heard here in first recordings; to the concluding Album for the young pianist which, beyond its obvious educational purpose, invites stylistic comparisons with Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.

An array of albums which should be of interest to even the most specialist of collector—available at reduced prices until the end of the year. Also included are a good number of albums celebrating Christmas down the musical ages (highlights from these are included on Vol. 1 of our December sampler—free to download), as well as a selection from our burgeoning vinyl edition. You can » Click here for a full listing.

Three new albums from Signum Classics remind us that Christmas is upon us once more. First up, St John’s College Choir Cambridge has recorded O holy night—a programme taking its cue from Adolphe Adam’s chart-busting hit from 1843. King’s College London Choir turns to A Christmas Offering by Kristina Arakelyan, a contemporary response to Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and worth exploring. And last—but very much not least—from Portsmouth Cathedral Choir we have The First Nowell—an impressively varied sequence of carols and sung with enviable vigour.

All the stars looked down is an immaculate new album from the true home of Christmas: King’s College Cambridge. Here, on the choir’s own label, we have a celebration Sir John Rutter, treasured carol arrangements by Sir David Willcocks and more, all presented against a lush orchestral backdrop courtesy of the Britten Sinfonia. Daniel Hyde conducts an album to remember.

For her latest album on Decca Classics, ever-popular violinist Nicola Benedetti invites the guitar of Plínio Fernandes, accordion of Samuele Telari, cello of Thomas Carroll and Scottish smallpipes of Brìghde Chaimbeul into her Violin Café—an inventive instrumental line-up revelling in a programme seamlessly blending virtuosic showpieces and French romance with contemporary classics and Scottish folk. A sound world like no other!

Acclaimed pianist Ivana Gavrić makes her debut on Signum Classics with a vivacious recital entitled Throwback to dance, a programme which traces the influence of dance forms old and new on a dazzling array of composers from Grieg and Ravel through to Dora Pejačević and Cheryl Frances-Hoad. And the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Kenneth Woods have recorded Symphonies Nos 8 & 9 by Christopher Gunning, the latest instalment in a cycle of this composer’s mature classical works.

Alchemists of the Italian Baroque La Serenissima have returned to the studios of Signum Classics to record Vivaldi Opus 8 Vol. 2 (or, more properly, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione—libro secondo): six concertos for violin, strings and continuo. With two additional concertos filling out the programme, this is Vivaldi at his vivacious best. Adrian Chandler directs from the violin.

A new set from historical piano label APR brings us The complete solo piano recordings of Nicolas Medtner. The composer first entered the Columbia studios in 1930/1 at a time of such fevered experimentation in recording technology that the masters were scrapped, surviving only as test pressings (now in the hands of no less a Medtnerite than Marc-André Hamelin). Alongside these near-miraculous survivals, we have further sessions from 1936 and 1946/7—definitive performances of many of the composer’s most important works.

It is a rare treat to find The Complete Songs of Rebecca Clarke as a set. Here we have over fifty songs—settings of Blake, Yeats, Rossetti and the like, plus a number of texts by Richard Dehmel—in lustrous performances from (primarily) soprano Kitty Whately, tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Anna Tilbrook. Also on Signum Classics we have Eleanor Daley’s Requiem and other choral works. The Requiem stands out as a distillation of melodic gift, poignant and rich in harmony, and is here performed by the Royal Holloway Choir and their conductor Rupert Gough.

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.