The phone giant’s Hum On! app was presented at the 2016 South by Southwest Festival.

UK study finds that choristers feel warmer about their teams than footballers. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Opening with the broad Festive March Op. 13, Ondine’s latest release of music by Finnish composer Toivo Kuula presents orchestral works from a composer better known for his vocal writing. Though more solemn than ‘festive’, the expansive March places Kuula in the tradition of Sibelius, with whom he studied composition. Kuula’s orchestral offerings are unfortunately limited: the composer died young, killed in a fight during celebrations for the end of Finland’s Civil War. The first South Ostrobothnian Suite opens with chorale-like brass and winds underscored by motoring pizzicato strings. The cor anglais is the star of this movement, Landscape, Satu Ala’s tone liquid and tenebrous. The second movement, Folk Song, drips with Finnish melancholy while Ostrobothnian Dance is elegant and convivial. The third movement, Devil’s Dance, is bright and cheery and Song of Dusk is full of rich melody, once again featuring the cor anglais. South Ostrobothnian Suite No. 2 is the work of a more mature composer, but is very much a suite of convenience raher than musical unity – Kuula himself often performed the movements separately at concerts he conducted. The final movement, Will-o’-the-Wisp, opens with a treacley cello solo and is longer than all of the preceding movements combined….

★★★★½ A moving lunchtime celebration and fusion of cultures. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Laura Chislett’s Flute Vox was envisaged as a kind of sequel to her 1995 collaboration with pianist Stephanie McCallum, The Flute in Orbit. More than 20 years later, the pair have released a double CD exploring more recent works by the composers featured on their first album, as well as a selection of other works. The album is an eclectic mix of contemporary flute works, from the solid intensity of Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5 – a venerable 80 years old this year – to Michael Smetanin’s spritely 2015 work for flutes and mixed media, Backbone. Toru Takemitsu’s Voice kicks off the first disc, the close, dry recording highlighting Chislett’s precise technique and making audible every nuance of breath, voice and air. While this allows the listener to hear every detail of Chislett’s playing, it also robs the work of some of its haunting mystery. Along with Varèse and Takemitsu, Iranian-American composer Reza Vali is the only other non-Australian composer on the recording, his Persian Suite (Folk Songs, Set No. 12E) contributing lyricism and spirited energy. The didgeridoo-like growls and percussive vocal attacks of Zadro’s Vox Box make it a rhythmically driven tour de force for amplified bass flute and Brett…

With works cherry-picked from across Saariaho’s career since 1982, this album shines a spotlight on the beauty and intimacy of her chamber music.

Ryan Wigglesworth is making a name for himself as an accomplished conductor, composer and pianist. He is Composer in Residence with the English National Opera, for whom he is writing an opera for the 2017 season, and is Principal Guest Conductor of the Hallé orchestra, who feature on this recording. This album is the first full-length portrait of his compositions and demonstrates his prowess over a variety of mediums. Wigglesworth’s Echo and Narcissus: A Dramatic Cantata, for which the album is named, is a setting of text from Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid that had its premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2014. Wigglesworth on piano is joined by mezzo-soprano Pamela Helen Stephen, tenor Mark Padmore and two choruses of female voices. Stephen, augmented by chorus, is the narrator – her voice sumptuous and authoritative. The part of Echo is sung by a wistfully distant second chorus (heard mainly from offstage), while Padmore makes an anxious, keening Narcissus. The album opens with Augenlieder, a suite of four songs, settings of poems linked thematically by eye or gaze imagery, written for soprano Claire Booth. Wigglesworth conducts the Hallé, the orchestra a haunting underbelly to Booth’s limpid soprano. Three orchestral works round…

Shostakovich’s cello concertos, both written for legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, swing from smouldering slow movements to flashes of manic, frenetic activity. This new recording from Erato pairs French cellist Gautier Capuçon with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra in a recording that highlights the exquisite details of Shostakovich’s cello writing, taken from concerts in 2013 and 2014 in Paris and St Petersburg. This is Capuçon’s second recording with Gergiev and Mariinsky, having previously released a CD of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev in 2010. Capuçon hits the spiky five-note motif that opens the First Concerto with restrained intensity. This personal motif, based on the initials of the composer’s name (DSCH), is repeated aggressively in various guises throughout the first movement, returning in the finale to give the concerto a cyclical framework. Capuçon’s tone in the Allegretto is liquid and velvet, but full of depth and crunch as he leans into the low double-stops. The Mariinsky’s strings are lushly dissonant as they introduce the second movement, Gergiev shaping them into flowing arcs before the creeping cello line enters. Capuçon’s glissandi sigh, his sound rich in the lower registers and smooth and glassy in the high. He harnesses space and silence in the cadenza…

Opera singer Cecilia Bartoli and songwriter Max Martin are this year's award winners.