Challenge Classics

De Vriend emphasises the music’s rusticity while maintaining a tight grip on orchestral detail – an odd balance of exuberance and sobriety that, at its best, evokes a peasant scene by Bruegel.... — Gramophone Magazine, September 2016 More…

Encouraged by the graceful, animated playing of Koopman’s period band, Yetzabel Arias Fernandez deploys her ‘straight’, slightly mezzo-ish soprano with taste and refinement…[Mertens is] always... — Gramophone Magazine, February 2017 More…

Koopman's recording is stylish, warmly communicative and, generally speaking polished. Only moments of astringent upper string playing interrupted my enjoyment of music that is well worth getting... — BBC Music Magazine, May 2007, 4 out of 5 stars More…

…contains several pieces of outstanding beauty and sterling merit. …the playing and singing… is very good indeed for the most part. Overall, the recording can be warmly commended. — BBC Music Magazine, October 2008, 4 out of 5 stars More…

This is neither facile, authorities-pleasing Communist agitprop or thorny modernism – instead, it resides in a recognisably late-Romantic world. Cellist Marina Tarasova inhabits her compatriots’... — BBC Music Magazine, June 2023, 5 out of 5 stars More…

[Triple Concerto] From the very opening in the low strings there is immediately a magical feeling about this performance. It should go without saying that each of the soloists plays with absolute... — Fanfare, September/October 2020 More…