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This disc of music by Wagner, very much a staple of Furtwängler’s repertoire, draws from recordings that would be amongst the conductor’s last.

As always, the great German conductor ensures maximum expression while allowing the music to move forward in an organic way.

The legendary Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad and Furtwängler were close as musicians over an extended period of time. Her beauty of tone, unforced strength, accurate intonation and ability to spin a long and precise vocal line are exemplified in this unforgettable performance of Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung.

Reissue Producer and Audio Restoration Engineer: Mark Obert-Thorn

This is the last volume in the acclaimed Naxos Schubert-Lied edition.

An exciting new release featuring some of Marilyn Monroe’s most enduring and popular songs.

All digitally restored by Alan Bunting.

Marilyn Monroe is regarded as one of the most popular and glamorous performers in Hollywood history.

Marilyn Monroe was awarded a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Some Like It Hot in 1960.

Producer and Audio-Restoration engineer: Mark Obert-Thorn.

Acclaimed as one of her generation’s finest interpreters of Richard Strauss (the composer himself identified her as his ideal Arabella), the Swiss soprano Lisa della Casa was blessed with a seemingly effortless, shimmeringly beautiful voice as well as an innate sense of musical style.

In the words of the distinguished critic John Steane: ‘Della Casa remains one of the best of all sopranos in Richard Strauss. Her voice has that touch of spring and silver that Strauss loved and wrote for; her tone will float and soar’.

These vivid recordings are essential for every collection.

New Zealand-born Edinburgh-based Lyell Cresswell has composed works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, choir, voice and solo instruments which have been widely performed and broadcast.

In The Voice Inside, he explores the ever-changing relationship between the soprano and violin soloists and the orchestra, while Cassandra’s Songs, which also set words by Scottish poet Ron Butlin, is concerned with exile, identity and belonging.

Alas! How Swift embodies in musical terms the inescapable passing of Time.

His Trombone Concerto takes its name Kaea from the Maori wooden war trumpet used to terrify enemies and raise alarms.

“Wonderful music, of great communicative power… I hope that it will lead to more recordings of Cresswell’s well-crafted and expressive music.” MusicWeb International on a previous release

A gifted composer of some 500 works, mainly songs and small piano pieces, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel has been eclipsed by the fame of her younger brother Felix Mendelssohn.

Yet her sensitivity in setting the German Romantic poets she loved, principally Goethe, Heine, Geibel and von Eichendorff, warrants greater attention.

Like Clara Schumann, whose songs Dorothea Craxton has also recorded for Naxos (8570747), Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel possessed a distinct and richly powerful musical voice, by turns introspective, melancholic, delicate, lilting and serene – which deserves to be heard on its own terms.

For his Naxos début recording, the internationally acclaimed Georgian baritone Lado Ataneli has selected operatic arias by Bizet, Donizetti, Leoncavallo, Verdi, Massenet, Mozart and Rossini, which showcase what the Los Angeles Times hailed as “one of the healthiest, roundest, most mellifluous voices on the planet”.

A sought-after interpreter of verismo rôles, Lado Ataneli has worked with conductors including Riccardo Muti, James Conlon and James Levine, sharing the stage with Plácido Domingo and other leading singers.

He closes his recital with an aria by Dimitri Arakishvili, one of the founders of modern Georgian music.

Messiaen’s song cycles Trois Mélodies (1930) and Harawi (1945) were both inspired by the loss of a loved one.

Mélodies are a memorial to his mother who had died three years previously, and Harawi was written shortly after his wife Claire Delbos had begun to suffer from the long illness that would ultimately lead to her death.

But far from resorting to misery, the shimmering beauty of Messiaen’s music leaves the listener with a sense of hope and transcendence.