Today's new releases include an 'Angels and Demons'-themed Baroque programme from La Serenissima on Signum, an eclectic programme spanning nine centuries of music from Jess Gillam on Decca, Egyptian soprano Fatma Said's 2025 recital from the Great Pyramid of Giza on Warner Classics, and a celebration of women and the piano from Susan Tomes on Hyperion.
Hell’s Angels
La Serenissima, Adrian Chandler
This album of French and Italian Baroque sonatas was inspired by an encounter between composer-violinists Pietro Locatelli and Jean-Marie Leclair, which took place at the court of Kassel in 1728 - the Dutch composer Jacob Wilhelm Lustig, who was in attendance, described the Italian's playing as demonic and the Frenchman's as angelic. Locatelli himself is absent from the programme, which includes music by his compatriots Vivaldi, Benedetto Marcello and Michele Mascitti alongside sonatas by Leclair and Guillemain.
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 96 kHz, 24 bit)
SHINE
Jess Gillam (saxophone)
Spanning nine centuries of music, Jess Gillam's latest album on Decca includes arrangements of songs by Hildegard von Bingen, Barbara Strozzi, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell and David Bowie, and instrumental pieces by CPE Bach, Corelli, Jess's fellow saxophonist Barbara Thompson, and Danish composer-violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen.
Presto will be hosting a launch event with Jess on Wednesday 14th October at our store in Leamington Spa.
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 44.1 kHz, 16 bit)
The Pyramids Recital
Fatma Said (soprano), Thibaut Maudry (violin), Hani El Sawaf (darbouka drums), Mohamed Ahmed (ney flute), Mohamed El Said (oud lute), Les Frivolités parisiennes, Sammy El Ghadab
Recorded in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza last December, the Egyptian soprano's programme includes arias from Rinaldo, Le nozze di Figaro, Gianni Schicchi and Saint-Saëns's Henry VIII, 'Yo soy María' from Piazzólla's María de Buenos Aires, 'Al pensar en el dueño de mis amores' from Chapí's Las hijas del Zebedeo, Strauss's 'Morgen!', and songs by Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Najib Hankash, and Farid El Atrache.
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 48 kHz, 24 bit)
Women & The Piano
Susan Tomes (piano)
Having appeared regularly on the label as a collaborative pianist, Tomes makes her Hyperion solo debut with a programme which was conceived as a companion to her 2024 book of the same name - featured composers include Marianne Martínez, Sophie Menter (a favourite pupil of Liszt), Maria Szymanowska, Teresa Carreño, and light music pianist Raie da Costa (whose prolific recording career was cut short by her death aged just 29).
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 48 kHz, 16 bit)
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Alain Altinoglu
Altinoglu and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra began their projected Shostakovich cycle last autumn with accounts of Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 which received five stars in BBC Music Magazine: reviewer Erik Levi noted that their 'terrifically incisive playing whets the appetite for further instalments in what promises to be a strongly recommendable set.'
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 48 kHz, 24 bit)
The Beethoven Connection, Vol. 2
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano)
Bavouzet began his survey of Beethoven's contemporaries back in 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, remarking that 'a great mountain never rises isolated in the landscape...from each summit we are offered a different view of the others!'. This second instalment features sonatas by Hummel, Clementi and Berger, plus the Funeral March on the Death of Ludwig van Beethoven which Czerny composed in 1827 (paying homage to the Eroica Symphony and the Piano Sonata No. 12).
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 96 kHz, 24 bit)
Transfigurations
Michala Petri (recorder), Kremerata Baltica, Peter Navarro-Alonso (organ), Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord), Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Andris Veismanis, Leif Segerstam
This triptych of works by Danish composer Poul Ruders (b. 1949) takes its title from the 'double portrait for recorder solo and string orchestra' which he wrote for Petri and Kremerata Baltica in 2022: Ruders describes the piece as featuring 'a relay run of the various recorders, from tenor to soprano to alto to sopranino and back again'. It's followed here by A Movable Concerto (subtitled 'Five Short Pieces for Positive Organ and Strings') and the 2022 Harpsichord Concerto which was composed for Mahan Esfahani.
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 96 kHz, 24 bit)
Softest Thunder
Toby Carr (lute)
Four years on from his Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine Award-winning duo album Battle Cry with mezzo Helen Charlston, Carr makes his solo debut on Delphian with a programme of seventeenth-century English and later French music, featuring pieces by Dowland, Robert Johnson and Robert Ballard plus his own arrangements of Purcell, Eccles, Satie and Poulenc.
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 96 kHz, 24 bit)
Marcel Dupré: Symphonie-Passion and other works
Richard Cook (organ), St Edmundsbury Cathedral Choir, Claudia Grinnell
This first solo recording from the Suffolk cathedral's Assistant Director of Music is built around Dupré's four-movement organ symphony depicting the life of Christ, which grew out of a series of improvisations on plainchant themes which the composer gave at a Philadelphia recital in 1921. The album also includes the original chants sung by the cathedral choir, the Quatre Motets Op. 9, and the Variations sur un Noël (on the old French carol 'Noël nouvelet').
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 96 kHz, 24 bit)
Uyaras - The Enchanted Voice
Bruno de Sá (soprano), Opéra Orchestre Normandie Rouen, Comunicantus Choir, Pierre Dumoussaud
Inspired by the Amazonian mermaids whose songs are fatally seductive, the Brazilian soprano's programme includes songs by his compatriots Villa-Lobos and Nepomuceno, Ravel's Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera, excerpts from Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne, Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, Gershwin's 'The Lorelei', a vocalise on 'Le Cygne' from Saint-Saëns's Le carnaval des animaux, and Heinrich Proch's formidable Aria and Variations on 'Deh, torna mio bene'.
Available formats: CD, Download & Streaming (up to 96 kHz, 24 bit)
Michele Carafa: Masaniello
Mert Süngü (Masaniello), Catherine Trottmann (Leona), Nathanaël Tavernier (Ruffino); Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus, Nicola Pascoli
Premiered at the Opéra-Comique at Christmas 1827, Masaniello centres on the true story of a Neapolitan fisherman who led an uprising against Spanish Habsburg rule and its sky-high food taxes (the same incident also provided inspiration for Auber's La muette de Portici the following year). The work was a breakthrough success for Carafa, a student of Cherubini and life-long friend of Rossini (who dedicated one of his 'Péchés de Vieillesse' to him).
Available formats: 2 CDs, Download & Streaming (up to 48 kHz, 24 bit)
Britten: Gloriana
Anna Caterina Antonacci (Elizabeth I) , Leonardo Capalbo (Robert Devereux), Paula Murrihy (Frances), Duncan Rock (Mountjoy), Sophie Bevan (Penelope), Leigh Melrose (Sir Robert Cecill), David Soar (Sir Walter Raleigh), Benedict Nelson (Henry Cuffe), Teatro Real Madrid, Ivor Bolton
This DVD/Blu-ray set captures the Spanish premiere of Britten's seldom-staged 1953 opera, written to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II but received coolly because of its depiction of a flawed, complex, ageing monarch rather than an idealised Virgin Queen. BachTrack deemed this new staging by Sir David McVicar as 'an unqualified success and the long-needed vindication of a neglected masterpiece' thanks to the Scottish director's willingness to 'expose the crooked architecture that sustains the royal glory'.
Available format: Blu-ray + DVD Video
