‘Memorable musical ideas, effortless conversations between the instruments in this performance, and a restlessly engaging scherzo [in No 2]. The Leonores sound as though they’re really enjoying this music, and so have I. Bargiel collaborated with Brahms on new editions of Schumann and Chopin; they became great friends as well. This man is so connected with the Romantic greats and yet, at best, he’s usually a footnote in their histories and now we can enjoy his piano trios’ (BBC Record Review)

‘Technically and emotionally challenging music for Holy Week and, as The Gesualdo Six’s director Owain Park puts it, ‘at times the harmonic movement seems almost unhinged, at others spellbindingly beautiful.’ And before the Gesualdo there’s the cooler but no less remarkable Lamentations by Thomas Tallis: wonderfully precise singing held by a jewel of a recording. And a couple of modern pieces as well, so it’s as though we’re looking at Holy Week through a different lens. One of my Easter highlights’ (BBC Record Review)

‘Stephen Hough is a beautifully thoughtful pianist, really sculpting out every phrase and every detail and making it his own, which is necessary in such a landmark piece as this [D894] … [he] takes a somehow more classical, more refined approach in something that seems to me very spiritual … a really beautifully thought out, phrased, balanced, paced recording’ (BBC Record Review)

‘Few pianists are more tirelessly exploratory than Marc-André Hamelin. In this enriching new album he turns to the strange and idiosyncratic world of CPE Bach … a world of quirky surprises, of fits and starts, of a determination to advance towards new musical horizons … dazzling advocacy, together with Hyperion’s superb sound and Mahan Esfahani’s scholarly and illuminating notes’ (International Piano)

‘Here The Gesualdo Six tackle two of Renaissance polyphony’s warhorses, an imaginative pairing that also welcomes two short works by contemporary composers. Tallis’s Lamentations and Gesualdo’s Responsories have been recorded many times by ensembles of the highest calibre. In both cases The Gesualdo Six do more than stake their claim … one has to applaud the element of risk-taking in their performance … if you don’t take risks with Gesualdo, you may as well not bother. In any case, it was time we heard them in the music of the composer whose name they have taken; the rest of the set is eagerly anticipated’ (Gramophone)

‘If anyone can lift [Mendelssohn's] violin sonatas from being viewed as charming but of niche interest then it’s Alina Ibragimova (one of today’s leading exponents of the E minor Concerto), all the more so when it’s hand in glove with the pianist with whom she’s produced such covetable sets of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, to name the composers who perhaps are these sonatas’ closest musical relatives. Happily, therefore, the results are every bit as good as one would hope. For starters, how wonderful to hear such natural, unfussy lyricism in the solo violin opening to the F minor Sonata, Op 4, of 1823, in place of the rubato and sometimes portamento-heavy, cadenza-like drama so many other violinists can’t resist … and I can’t not mention the merry, fairy-dusted virtuosity with which they flutter out the Midsummer Night’s Dream-esque finales of both F major sonatas. In a word, delicious’ (Gramophone)

‘Osborne’s readings of this repertoire are generously but never sentimentally nuanced and inflected. His sonority ranges from a roaring torrent of sound to the merest whisper, while his complete command of voicings brings crystal clarity to Rachmaninov’s idiosyncratic polyphony. All this is true of his performance of the Sonata in D minor, which emerges as a towering Romantic masterpiece … Osborne trumps all aces. His playing, heard in Hyperion’s magnificent sound, is of an authority beyond authority’ (International Piano)

‘Andrey Gugnin is a more than reliable guide to this repertoire. He responds eagerly to the special qualities of even the most modest piece: hear the lightly teasing tone he finds for the long fourth Mazurka of Op 3 or the skittishness of the sixth in the same set, or his sensitivity to the unexpected withdrawals at the end of several of the Op 25. He has an excellent feel for the dance idiom and a subtlety of tonal palette that protects him from the temptation to exaggerate’ (Gramophone)

‘Andrey Gugnin does his countryman proud. In the wrong hands, the composer’s sensitive, fleeting and often unresolved soundworld can seem incoherent, but Gugnin shapes every piece sensitively and knowingly … these are captivating pieces performed by a pianist wholly invested in them’ (Pianist)

‘We all have favourite recordings and cherished performances of the Sibelius symphonies but Mäkelä’s cycle is all of a piece, accomplished, insightful and full of the beauty and intrigue that make these works so perennially exciting. An uber-auspicious debut’ (Gramophone)

‘The Scottish tenor’s gift for combining pure tone with direct, daring expression makes this a covetable disc (even with so many available versions out there, including John Mark Ainsley’s, also on Hyperion). In Is My Team Ploughing?, hushed strings pulsating, Spence handles the leaps from pianissimo to full voice with absolute control. Bredon Hill conjures the hot stillness of a summer’s day, piano tolling and pealing as 'distant bells', the high strings suddenly transforming all to icy winter and sorrow: magically done by all, as is the whole disc’ (The Guardian)

‘Most Finnish greats have recorded cycles of Sibelius symphonies at least once … who’d have predicted that this latest, from Klaus Mäkelä at the helm of the Oslo Philharmonic, would be the most electrifying and often revelatory of them all?’ (BBC Music Magazine)