Silk Baroque presents a musical encounter between Wu Wei and Holland Baroque, performing a programme that ranges from Baroque greats such as Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann and Rameau to Chinese traditional tunes, all tied together by the musicians’ openness to improvisation, experimentation and cultural exchange. Wu Wei plays the sheng, an extraordinary ancient Chinese mouth organ, which looks like a bundle of bamboo reeds cased in a metal bowl. It is a miracle of harmony, melody and rhythmic possibilities, and Wu Wei’s abilities fully bring out the sheng’s beauty: whispering, charming, and compelling. Age-old traditions come together in performances that sound fresh and contemporary. Silk Baroque carries listeners into a lively, enticing and fascinating sound world.

"The trees are coming into leaf/Like something almost being said." Taking a cue from these lines of Philip Larkin, pianist Simone Dinnerstein casts her album of the music of J.S. Bach and Franz Schubert in poetic terms. Her understanding of the composers is summed up in her own words: "The music of Bach and Schubert share a distinctive quality, as if wordless voices were singing textless melodies." Of course, Bach and Schubert were masters of setting texts to profoundly expressive music, so it is fruitful to look for the lyrical impulse in their keyboard works and appropriate to find songful interpretations. Yet Dinnerstein doesn't merely serve up rhapsodic renditions or treat the music as some kind of tuneful vehicle for idiosyncratic or personal reveries. Her playing is quite in character for both composers, and her treatment of the material is far from self-indulgent.

Violinists Simone Lamsma and Candida Thompson explore connections between J.S. Bach and Arvo Pärt on their new release Pärt über Bach with Amsterdam Sinfonietta. Arvo Pärt’s groundbreaking Tabula Rasa is presented alongside Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin in the version for 2 violins, and Pärt’s own Collage über B-A-C-H , written in 1964 wherein the Estonian master intertwines his own modernist music with phrases from J.S. Bach’s music.

This fabulous five disc set is replete with some of those old Stokowski warhorses all recorded in absolutely mind boggling Phase 4 sound, overblown perhaps but astounding for its time. Decca's remastering is absolutely magnificent and the discs are jam packed with almost six hours of music. This is another fine memorial to a great conductor who remained astonishingly vital until the very end of his life.

2007 has been a banner year for Goldbergs; no less than five recorded versions of the piece had appeared by the end of July, including a digitally reinterpreted incarnation of Glenn Gould's famous 1955 recording and Wilhelm Middelschulte's bizarre, psychedelic 1924 transcription of the work for organ. In the face of such circumstances, no one would blame music critics for throwing up their hands and saying something like "enough already!" Nevertheless, thankfully the Goldberg Variations is not that kind of a piece, its appeal is both immutable and universal. Ultimately it comes down to the personality of the keyboard player to make something out of the Goldberg Variations that stands apart from the pack, and young pianist Simone Dinnerstein has managed to do that with her glorious rendering of Bach's cycle for Telarc. Her rendering of the Aria is slower than the norm and her approach to tempo throughout is very elastic; there is nothing rigid about her interpretation of the work. Dinnerstein's reading involves a great deal of give and take, seeking to deepen the expressive potential of Bach's music without losing sight of its basic shape.

Mit einer attraktiven, opulent gestalteten und sehr empfehlenswerten Doppel-CD wartet die polnische, derzeit an der Mainzer Musikhochschule (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität) wirkende Organistin auf. Anna Pikulska vereint hier die beiden großartigen Orgeln aus der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts von Tobias Heinrich Gottfried Trost in Waltershausen und von Gottfried Silbermann im Freiberger Dom. Das ist eine glänzende, bisher noch nicht verwirklichte Idee und zugleich der besondere Aspekt dieser Audio-Dokumentation, denn in der Gegenüberstellung dieser Höhepunkte des thüringischen und sächsischen Orgelbaus mit sehr konträren Konzeptionen eröffnen sich natürlich beste Vergleichsmöglichkeiten.

Igor Levit’s new double album Fantasia features a wide range of works spanning a period of almost two centuries from 1720 to 1910 and showcases key compositions by Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Johann Sebastian Bach and Alban Berg. The starting point of the four paradigmatic works featured on the double album is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Levit has chosen Bach’s exceptional Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and combined it with Liszt’s B minor Sonata, a highly charged piece that at the time of its composition looked far ahead into the future (which Levit is currently performing to great acclaim all over the world), together with Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, in which Busoni perpetuated the Bach tradition, and Alban Berg’s only Piano Sonata.

Violinst Rachel Podger presents the first recording of Bach's Cello Suites on violin. Bach had a habit of recycling his own compositions for different instruments and different uses. The examples are endless; concertos appearing as sinfonias in cantatas, or concertos for violins turned into harpsichord concertos. Podger, who has spent a fair bit of time coaching cellists, both modern and baroque alike, found herself playing along to demonstrate various points. ''I started catching myself playing some of the movements I particularly loved while warming up, and realizing that it was actually possible to play them on the violin, and to find a special expressive vocabulary at the higher pitch.''

The Yorkshire Baroque Soloists and Yorkshire Bach Choir were formed in 1973 as the basis of the famous York Early Music Festival, and have built a firm reputation as one of the finest ensembles in the world in their performance and interpretation of 17th and 18th century music. Under their director Peter Seymour they return to disc with a fine selection of soloists to perform Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Their 2009 disc of Bach’s St John Passion, also on Signum, was released to excellent reviews.

The 18th set of Bach's cantatas contains exclusively works of the third yearly cycle from Leipzig. Unlike the first two Leipzig yearly cycles, this one extends over a longer period: from June 1725 until 1727. The works in this set belong essentially to the years 1725-26 and are in some cases chronologically contiguous (BWV 187 and 45; BWV 98, 55, 52), with the result that the original sequence can be easily grasped.

In its way, this German release is more radical than many of the other discs on which recorder players have asserted their rights to big swaths of the Baroque repertory. The radical quality doesn't lie in the arrangement of Bach works for the recorder, which in no way goes beyond Bach's own musical recycling ethic. (Three works were originally written for flute, one was an organ trio sonata, one was a violin sonata, and one is for harpsichord alone.) The unusual quality of the arrangement instead lies in the treatment of the accompanimental harpsichord, which is all alone with no gamba or anything else supporting its fundamental line.

Very few conductors have recorded as much Bach as Karl Richter and none can lay a stronger claim to a legacy based on championing the master. Richter's reverence for Bach is evinced by the simplicity, splendor, and grandeur with which he consistently imbued his performances exemplified here by these landmark recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites. In Archiv's original-image bit-processing remastered transfers as well, the sound is better than ever. This is cornerstone Bach that should not be missed.

Angela Hewitt’s acclaimed recordings of Bach on the piano have received the highest critical acclaim and found their way into thousands of homes, selling nearly 400,000 copies since her recording of the Inventions burst onto the scene in 1994. Now for the first time Angela’s complete solo Bach is available as a boxed set of 15 CDs at a special price. A perfect gift for the few music-lovers left in the world who have not experienced these matchless performances; and for those who have, a chance to fall in love all over again.