Steven Osborne is one of those rare musicians equally at home in the great Viennese classics as on the wilder shores of contemporary piano music (and everything in between) and his new recording couples a late Schubert Piano Sonata & Moments musicaux. The piano sonata in question is D959 in A major: one of the three monumental sonatas Schubert completed (and performed) in September 1828, only a few weeks before his shockingly early death. Here, Osborne contrasts it with the set of six exquisite miniatures aimed at the capable amateur pianist in what was a burgeoning domestic market. For an earlier Schubert recital on Hyperion Osborne was praised by Gramophone magazine as ‘a Schubertian of the utmost seriousness and integrity’, and July’s Record of the Month promises a similarly perceptive reception.

The fourth Hyperion release from Charles Cole and The London Oratory Schola Cantorum, Sacred treasures of Rome is a celebration of one composer in particular and, more widely, of the Golden Age of polyphony which flourished in sixteenth-century Rome. 2025 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and his status as the pre-eminent Renaissance polyphonist is reflected in the selection of glorious motets the Schola has recorded here, framing music by some of Palestrina’s Italian contemporaries. As always, recordings by the Schola remind us that this is a working, liturgical choir performing music which can still be heard in its proper context at the London Oratory.