With Francisco Garro’s Missa O quam pulchra es & Missa Cantate Domino, Gramophone Award-winning vocal ensemble Cupertinos and director Luís Toscano turn to another of the composers who contributed to the rich musical legacy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portugal. Garro may be less familiar than some of his near contemporaries, but it was only early in the last century that the confusion over his name was conclusively resolved (previous sources wrongly identify a fictitious Francisco Garcia) and the booklet documents some of the detective work involved in rescuing this neglected figure from posthumous obscurity. None of which would matter if the results as recorded here did not merit such painstaking research, which they do—abundantly so.

This month sees the release of a further five albums in Hyperion’s Vinyl Edition. All are new to vinyl and feature some of the artists with whom the label has enjoyed particularly close or long-standing associations over the years. They are released as limited-edition 180g LPs, presented in full-colour gatefolds and with sleeve notes included.

Angela Hewitt is represented by the LP release of her recording of Bach Arrangements, a selection from the wealth of twentieth-century piano transcriptions of Bach’s music by Wilhelm Kempff and others, culminating with Eugen d’Albert’s magnificent transcription of the C minor Passacaglia. Described by The Independent as ‘the stuff of legend’, Steven Isserlis’s multi-award-winning accounts of the Bach Cello Suites need little introduction. These must count among the most highly praised versions ever committed to disc, and vinyl aficionados will welcome the appearance of this three-LP set. Fading is another of the remarkable concept albums from The Gesualdo Six, an exploration of the ancient Office of Compline in a programme stretching from the twelfth century (Saint Hildegard) to the twenty-first. Radio 3’s Record Review thought the 2020 CD release ‘just incredible’. A critical and commercial success since its original release, and hailed by Gramophone as a ‘remarkable disc … played with a nonchalant aplomb and magical dexterity hard to imagine from any other pianist’, Marc-André Hamelin’s coruscating album of Piano Music by Nikolai Kapustin now makes its appearance on vinyl. Alina Ibragimova’s accounts of the two Shostakovich Violin Concertos, strongly supported by Vladimir Jurowski and the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia ‘Evgeny Svetlanov’, rank with the finest. This album won the Concerto category in the 2021 Gramophone Awards; it’s now available as a double-LP set.

Something rather special from Decca Classics this month: the Bach Goldberg Variations as performed by Yunchan Lim at Carnegie Hall on 25 April 2025. This recording offers a deeply personal vision of Bach’s seminal composition, one which amply rewards the listener with its compelling purpose.

A new recording from LSO Live imaginatively couples Tchaikovsky Symphony No 6 with the Prelude to Khovanshchina by Musorgsky, the latter as completed by Rimsky-Korsakov after its composer’s all-too-early death. Tchaikovsky wrote of the symphony—it was to be his last—that he had put his whole soul into it: suffused with tragedy and violence, this is Russian Romanticism at it most raw, and it is performed here with vivid relish by Gianandrea Noseda and his London Symphony Orchestra forces.

Reflection from Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Huw Watkins brings together works by Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Oliver Knussen and Huw Watkins himself: two violin sonatas, one Duo concertant (Stravinsky’s riposte to sonata form) and Knussen’s Reflection, composed for and dedicated to the current performers. This is a programme sublimely marrying musical interest with performances and recorded sound of the first order. Also on Signum Classics, Alexandra Dariescu has recorded A Child’s Dream. Kicking off with Mozart’s K382 Rondo (the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in hot pursuit), the programme goes on to include delightfully unexpected rarities and discoveries from the widest panoply of composers.

American Tapestry is a daring new album on Signum Classics from the Calidore String Quartet. Opening with Samuel Barber’s String Quartet No 1 (the one with the adagio …), the quartet then leaps fearlessly into the weird and wonderful world of Wynton Marsalis’s Octoroon Balls, concluding with a special arrangement (by the composer) of John Williams’s hit from the film Lincoln, and Erich Korngold’s supremely filmic String Quartet No 3.