There are no new Hyperion recordings this month; our September releases will be available from Friday 28 August 2020.

For the whole of August we're offering 100 albums for just £7.00 per CD. For physical CD-buyers, that's a saving of over 30% in many cases; 16-bit download prices are matched to the compact disc. The selection is as wide-ranging as you'd expect from Hyperion and even includes a couple of our Gramophone Award winners. You'll find listings of the albums available at this price via the links below where we've divided them into the broad categories orchestral, chamber, instrumental, choral and vocal.

Does Mahan Esfahani not realize that the harpsichord is a modest, unassuming creature, with a voice best suited to domestic intimacy and Baroque decorum? Clearly not, on the evidence of Musique? – Modern and electro-acoustic works for harpsichord—and a good thing too, or we would have been denied this most visceral, explosive (at times almost literally so) programme of works written for the instrument, some involving considerable electronic fortifications. Featuring six composers who, over the course of the last sixty years, completely rethought the possibilities of the harpsichord, July's Record of the Month promises a thrilling recital. The Piano Concertos by Rubbra & Bliss may date from the middle decades of the last century, but they remain true to the spirit of the Romantic Piano Concerto series, which here reaches volume eighty-one. With the addition of a makeweight by Bax, this is a programme of three life-affirming works in lustrous accounts from Piers Lane, Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now.

The flawless all-male voices of Cinquecento turn to another exponent of the Franco-Flemish polyphony which is central to their repertoire in Missa Rex Babylonis & other works by Johannes de Cleve. This sequence of rich, intense vocal works embodies the musical tastes and trends in the Habsburg courts of the later sixteenth century, and the composer will come as yet another rewarding discovery from this source.

Whether Vivaldi, Albinoni, Matteis or Brescianello ever donned footballing colours is questionable, but the concept of Extra time allows director Adrian Chandler and his wonderful La Serenissima to assemble an opulent array of recordings which would otherwise have been lost to the Signum cutting-room floor.

From Collegium this month we have Stanford and Howells Remembered. While much of this album was originally issued in 1992, this remastered version includes several tracks previously unissued. Stanford and Howells represent the absolute pinnacle of the English church music tradition, and it is a tradition to which these performances by The Cambridge Singers and John Rutter are fully alive.

Newly re-issued on the Cala Signum imprint is an explosive first recording of Lawrence Leonard's arrangement of Musorgsky Pictures from an exhibition—a piano concerto is born?—and a generous array of lesser-known Musorgskian gems in enterprising orchestral garb, including the previously unrecorded Pictures from the Crimea in the orchestration by Walter Goehr. Geoffrey Simon conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.

On their own label The Hallé Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder continue their esteemed series with a new recording of Debussy Images & other works. These orchestral masterpieces, written in the years following the success of La mer, are coupled with the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Debussy's own orchestration of one of his piano waltzes, and the first recording of Et la lune descend in another of Colin Matthews's acclaimed orchestrations.

In Spring 2019, The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, presented a critically acclaimed European tour of Handel’s Semele, their first performances of the work since the pioneering recording of the 1980s. A glamorous team of young soloists joins the ensemble to bring the story to thrilling life in this SDG recording made live in London's Alexandra Palace Theatre.