Operalia winner Aida Garifullina was signed to an exclusive recording contract by Decca back in 2015. It has taken a while, but now, with the release of her self-titled debut album – an exquisite selection of 19th-century songs, arias and folk-lullabies – we can finally hear why. The Russian lyric soprano has a wonderful technical ease which, coupled with a full, even tone, promises much for the future. But, in case you’re judging a singer by her repertoire, it’s worth pointing out that this disc doesn’t tell the whole story. Glancing down the generous programme from Juliette’s Je veux vivre to the Bell Song from Lakmé and the Queen of Shemakha’s two arias from The Golden Cockerel, you’d imagine perhaps a lighter, higher voice than you actually get. It’s a sleight-of-hand that’s far from unpleasant. Transposed down a tone, the Delibes gains in resonance and colour – these are bells of burnished gold rather than silver – and while Garifullina’s Juliette feels more poised society hostess than love-struck innocent, she’s one you’d clear your schedule for. Coloratura showpieces aside, the bulk of the disc comprises Russian repertoire, much of it glancing to the East and drawing on the soprano’s Tatar…

How do you take your Poulenc? I only ask because, conveniently, The Sixteen have recorded a lot of the repertoire on their latest disc before, and their thinking has changed dramatically in the 30-year gap. The contrast between the 1990 Figure Humaine (Virgin Classics, now Erato 5624312) and the newly released Francis Poulenc: Choral Music (CORO) is striking – neither an improvement nor the reverse, simply two very different approaches to the composer’s sacred music. Poulenc’s journey to faith was a swift and dramatic one. The turning point is usually placed in 1936, when two separate events together propelled the composer into a new state of mind. The sudden and violent death of his friend, composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, in a car accident prompted a visit to the small chapel at Rocamadour, where a mystical experience restored the Catholicism of his childhood. He immediately began work on a sacred piece – the Litanies à la Vierge Noir – taking his first steps in a genre that would become a constant throughout his life. The sound-world of Figure Humaine is one of gauzy, glossy beauty – a Mannerist vision of a heaven that’s all soft-focus loveliness and elegance. These are performances that…

It was the soundtrack to 1994 film Farinelli that put Les Talens Lyriques on the musical map over two decades ago. Now Christophe Rousset and his musicians mark their 25th anniversary by coming full circle, with an album of arias associated once again with the 18th century’s star castrato. But Farinelli is now well-trodden ground. Vivica Genaux, David Hansen and Philippe Jaroussky are just the most recent singers to lay claim to this repertoire on disc, so is there really a need for another homage? There are two strong arguments in this disc’s favour. In Ann Hallenberg, Rousset has a collaborator whose agility, power, and range of vocal colour is singular – capable of inhabiting both of Farinelli’s contrasting musical personalities. The project is also particularly canny in its repertoire choices, rejecting the usual single-composer route in favour of a broad selection of musical highlights from, not only Handel and Porpora, but also Leo, Hasse, Giacomelli and even Farinelli’s own composer brother. The result is a disc full of musical drama, heightened by a live recording originally made in 2011 at the Bergen International Festival. After a slightly slow start in Riccardo Broschi’s handsome, but pedestrian Son qual nave and…

Renée Fleming is no stranger to crossover. America’s favourite soprano has dabbled in rock music (2010’s Dark Hope), jazz (2005’s Haunted Heart), even duetted with Michael Bolton. But, until now, these have remained off-duty projects, separate from her official operatic identity. But in Distant Light she brings two worlds together, combining covers of Björk songs with music by Barber and Anders Hillborg in a recording that might just offer a vision of things to come in the classical music business. This feels like a coherent and convincing recital programme, tipping naturally from Barber’s hazy vision of pre-lapsarian America into Hillborg’s luminous sonic landscapes before casting off the classical anchor and drifting out into Björk’s broad lakes of sound and texture, beautifully reimagined in Hans Ek’s arrangements. Fleming still has one of the loveliest voices in the business, and that blooming tone is celebrated not only in the Barber but in Hillborg’s settings of poems by Mark Strand, former US Poet Laureate, which eschew the composer’s signature massive soundscapes for gentler, more intricate textures (lovingly performed here by Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic). If the tone feels more manufactured in the three Björk tracks, it’s not unpleasantly so. Together they…

Once the remit of boy choristers and early music specialists only, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater has evolved into a star vehicle.

If the violin is the tempestuous, attention-hogging soprano of the string world, the viola is the mezzo – gently melancholic, often found lurking in the shadows just beyond the violin’s spotlight. With this album, Lawrence Power asks a question: what would happen if the viola took centre-stage, stepping forward not just for high-minded sonatas and concertos but for precisely the kind of bravura concert pieces so beloved by violinists?   The answer may not offer the most satisfying recital programme, but it does shed light on some little-known and still-less-often performed repertoire, giving the character-actor of the string family a bold new starring role in the process. Glance down the repertoire list for Fin de Siècle and you get a thrillingly wide-angle view on a period of French music too often distilled down to just Debussy and Ravel, with maybe a smattering of Chausson if you’re lucky. Henri Büsser, Georges Hüe, Léon Honnoré, Lucien Durosoir – the names are as fragrant as their music, whether it’s Büsser’s episodic Appassionato – an ear-seizing opener that packs both high-wire angst and reflective ennui into its barely five-minute span – Hüe’s moody sonata-in-miniature Thème Varié, with its wistful theme and highly characterised sequence…

Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča’s voice has only been growing in power and weight since she first came onto the scene in 2001, unaccountably missing out on the top prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. Now, several albums later and with many role successes at the Met and Royal Opera under her belt, she returns with a new recording and a new sound. Well, perhaps not entirely new. Garancˇa has been heading towards this heavier repertoire for a while, trading her signature bel canto for Verdi, verismo and the swoonier French 19th-century repertoire. Scenes from Samson et Dalila and Werther are inevitable, but arias for Eboli, Santuzza and Didon (let alone Marina’s Skuchno Marine… from Boris Godunov) feel more exploratory, more like first steps in a new journey. No Amneris or Azucena yet, but Garanča’s programme note makes clear that it’s only a matter of time. The theme underpinning this wide-ranging collection of scenes and arias is an interesting one: strong women at moments of crisis. It’s not a concept that reduces very tidily to a tagline, but musically it amounts to an album of beautifully managed contradictions. Garanča finds the girlish frailty in Santuzza as well as…

Scandinavian choral reveries: The Norwegian Soloists takes us from comforting to confronting.

Edmund Rubbra is a composer who has faded from English musical history, written out of a narrative that jumps straight from Vaughan Williams and Holst to Britten and Walton. But this release from The Sixteen is a defiant and overdue attempt to rewrite that history, to establish Rubbra where he belongs, as one of the most distinctive harmonic voices of his generation – not the conservative throwback he has been painted, but a composer for whom the possibilities of tonality were far from exhausted. That voice might emerge most emphatically in Rubbra’s 11 symphonies, but his choral works distil their harmonic language into something cleaner, more concise. The sonic imagination here roams widely, from the craggy, sharp-edged beauty of the Tenebrae Motets to the gauzy clouds of modal richness established by the two choirs of the Missa Cantuariensis and the lightly-worn contrapuntal skill of Vain Wits and Except the Lord. This music gives little away on the page – its impact is all in the pacing and careful textural balance of performance. Harry Christophers deploys his singers with care, ensuring absolute vertical clarity and balance, but also a horizontal flow that propels music whose organic, evolving structures can easily become…

The Victorians changed the festive season as we know it, but Dickens changed the way Victorians themselves saw Christmas.

Katie Mitchell is a director who divides her audience. Some champion the probing psychology of her shows, their meticulous, realist visuals, their staunchly feminist agenda. Others balk at what they see as a prefab, one-size-fits-all approach. But whatever your camp, when Mitchell finds a show to suit her inherent sympathies the result is unassailable. This Alcina, originally staged for the 2015 Aix-en-Provence Festival, is the director at her very best – a marriage of concept and psychology so instinctive, so exhilarating in its invention, that it’s impossible to imagine it bettered. Unpacking the limits of power in all its forms – love, magic, violence, authority – Handel’s opera is one of his most probing emotional portraits, and a piece ripe for Mitchell’s gaze. She pulls back the curtain on Alcina’s sorcery, revealing the blunt, unpalatable mechanisms behind her illusions, showing us the woman not the witch. Chloe Lamford’s designs place us in a decaying doll’s house of a set. Rooms are spread over two floors, but only the central salon is fully lit. Within this magic space Alcina (Patricia Petibon) and Morgana (Anna Prohaska) seduce and subdue their lovers, glorying in their youth and beauty. But as soon as they…

A composer of Catholic liturgical music in a Lutheran society, Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) was fighting an uphill battle for popularity even during his own lifetime. After his death, his music all but disappeared from the repertoire, and still remains firmly on the fringes of concert programming. One ensemble, however, is doing more than any to change this. For over 20 years, Czech conductor Václav Luks and his superb Collegium 1704 choir and orchestra have been turning out eloquent recordings that celebrate the  intricate counterpoint and bold harmonic gestures of the composer JS Bach so admired. Their latest is particularly interesting: a world premiere recording of the Missa Divi Zaveri, a major 1729 work thus far silenced by the poor condition (including lost parts) of its surviving manuscript. Now Luks himself has produced a complete edition, and the results are thrilling. The Mass features the largest forces Zelenka ever composed for, including four trumpets, timpani, doubled flutes and oboes as well as strings, chorus and SATB soloists. The result is truly festal in scale, possibly an informal audition for the job of kapellmeister at Dresden that would eventually go to Hasse.  With no Credo, the centre of musical gravity shifts…