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A collection of everyone’s favourite sacred choral music, including Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine and Franck’s Panis angelicus.

In addition to these famous works is music by Bruckner, Stanford, Grieg, Byrd, Mendelssohn, Lotti, Rachmaninoff, Elgar and Brahms. This is music to soothe the soul!

5 CD + CD ROM of booklet notes and sung texts

CD 1: Lamentation

CD 2: Henry Purcell

CD 3: Evensong & Vespers at King's - Vespers for the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary - Evenson for Advent

CD 4: Sacred Choral Favourites

CD 5: Works by Rutter, Bernstein & Poulenc

This set contains a selection of the recordings by the great French violinist focusing on his prowess as a chamber musician.

Ferras was born in 1933 of musical parentage – his father had been a violinist and a pupil of Marcel Chailley, a devotee and friend of Saint-Saëns. Though Christian’s talent was not in dispute, his father was extremely pushy and the undue pressure he exerted on his young son probably led to the mental instability that led to Ferras’s suicide in 1982. At the age of 8, Ferras enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire and in 1943 won first prize.

He recorded for the major record companies, and his colleague and friend, the violinist Zino Francescatti, commented that these recordings with Pierre Barbizet made in 1968 over five days were ‘musical perfection’. Ferras was ranked alongside Oistrakh, Stern, Menuhin and Francescatti in the top five violinists of his age, and it was Ferras whom Menuhin chose as ‘the ideal partner’ for the recording of the Bach Double Concerto for EMI in 1959.

Included are the three Brahms sonatas, the two by Schumann and those by Franck and the intriguing, short-lived Belgian Lekeu. Disc 4 contains encores that Ferras was especially fond of.

This set is a superb portrait of a great artist, who was gifted beyond anyone’s wildest dreams but lost the fight with his inner demons of depression and alcohol dependency. Essential listening for all lovers of the violin

‘Ferras is a player who habitually turns the simplest of melodic lines to poetical song … Lovers of the César Franck who happen not to know the Lekeu could well find a real extension of their pleasure in this very good record.’ Gramophone

‘Finely balanced yet ardent performance of the (Brahms) First Sonata.’ Gramophone

Extensive booklet tribute to and survey of Ferras’s life and career

The repertoire in this set ranges from J.S. Bach (four of the solo suites) to Schnittke (Suite in the old style). As is customary in this series, some of the music included is virtually unknown in the West, for example the Romance by Nikolai Rakov and the Melody by Vladimir Vlasov.

See also the Russian Legends box set.

The grand swell and floating poetry of César Franck’s works for organ have long given rise to descriptions such as musical incense, which focus on their numinous spiritual address, perhaps at the expense of their ingenious construction, which may owe much to a Wagnerian, leitmotivically inspired process of continuous development but also to older models of the French organ school – and which in turn became influential for the next two generations of French organ composers such as Dupré and Duruflé.

The Three Chorals and the Pièce héroïque are relatively well known now, at least in recital (their technical difficulties place them beyond the reach of many church organists, and a few church organs, come to that), but beyond those late and deeply intimate explorations are some spectacular transformations of Bachian counterpoint into 19th-century showpieces such as the Final in B flat. Adriano Falcioni (b.1975) recently won golden opinions for his recital at the organ of Sheffield Cathedral, and has performed on the instruments of many great European churches and cathedrals.

This particular recording was made in the Basilica of S.Maria degli Angeli in Assisi: a beautiful church in its own right, made only more so by acting as an ecclesiastical shell for the chapel of the Porziuncola, which is known as the birthplace of the Franciscan order: St Francis himself died but a few metres from the door of the chapel, well within the grounds of what is now a spectacular basilica.

Recorded in 2008.

Muza Rubackyte is a Lithuanian pianist living in Paris. She has made many recordings for the Lyrinx label, including an acclaimed set of Liszt, of which the BBC Music Magazine wrote, ‘Rubackyte’s Annees de Pelerinage rises to the top of this cycle’s shortlist.’ This month sees her debut on Brilliant Classics, in two albums of music by César Franck. Franck's dense, chromatic harmonies and incense-laden melodies present unique challenges to pianists.

After Karajan’s two-year, fly-by-night tenure at the helm of the Orchestre de Paris, the orchestra was looking for a music director of potentially equal standing but greater commitment. Step forward Daniel Barenboim, who had already made waves over the other side of the Atlantic with his concerts and recordings at the helm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, succeeding in the process in fashioning interpretations of tremendous sweep, richness and splendour and harnessing the legendary sound of the orchestra, and especially its brass section, towards more malleable, less driven goals than the orchestra’s long-standing music director, Sir Georg Solti.

Among Barenboim’s most notable recordings in Chicago were of symphonies by Schumann, Bruckner and Saint-Saëns: composers of great relevance when considering the heady, Franco-German aesthetic of the Belgian composer-organist César Franck. Franck was, of course, first and foremost a Wagner epigone, who translated the German master’s heady chromaticism into clouds of musical incense. The Symphony is a three movement work of continuous development and long threads of melody. Psyché is a multi-movement tonepoem telling an erotic story of Classical legend. The complete version includes obligatory wordless female chorus (think Ravel’s Daphnis and Piernés Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied, as well as Debussy’s Nocturnes). This version, as is commonly done, shaves off the choral movements.

This CD contains the three great French sonatas for violin and piano. Franck’s large-scale four-movement work was completed in 1886 at the same time as his D minor symphony, and string quartet. It was dedicated to the great Belgian violinist and composer Eugene Ysaye on the occasion of his marriage. The score was presented to Ysaye at the wedding breakfast, and he promptly gave an impromptu premiere to the guests! He later gave the official premier a month later – from memory as the light in the hall was so poor. Like many of Frank’s large-scale works, the sonata uses a subtle and unassuming theme that is the basis of the entire work, and this thematic cell is heard at the very beginning of the work.

Debussy’s sonata was completed in 1916, at the height of the First World War. Debussy was already suffering from the cancer that would kill him. The work was premiered with the young violinist Gaston Poulet and Debussy at the piano. Poulet was killed in March 1918, and this premiere proved to be his last public appearance.

Ravel’s sonata dates from the years 1923–27, and premiered by George Enescu, a life long friend of Ravel since student days. The Sonata has a central movement that has a clearly jazz inspired blues mood, with the violin imitating a saxophone and a crooner, with the piano playing a strutting syncopated accompaniment.

Recording made in 1985.

New booklet notes.