It is only relatively recently that Fanny Mendelssohn has stepped out of the shadow of her more famous sibling Felix. This volume of piano music spans almost her entire adult life, from youthful experiments to music written less than a year before her untimely death, giving the listener a whirlwind tour of a much underrated composer.

The Naxos series devoted to the orchestral music of Aram Khachaturian continues with two pieces that both feature the cello. The Cello Concerto is the most resourceful and forward-looking of his works from this period, qualities which did not endear it to the authorities at a difficult time for Soviet musicians, while the Concert-Rhapsody pursues a personal approach to the combining of soloist and orchestra that is highly convincing on its own terms.

Fauré's musical language bridged a gap between 19th-century Romanticism and the music that appeared with the new century, developing and evolving, but retaining its own fundamental characteristics.

This disc is the fifth and final release in Naxos's acclaimed series of William Schuman’s symphonies, and concludes with his powerful and at times playful Eighth Symphony, in which the great American composer takes full advantage of the diverse instrumental colours available from a very large orchestra, including two harps, piano, and batteries of brass, wind and percussion instruments.

Ralph Vaughan Williams's sublime Mass in G minor reveals the composer’s absorbing interest in using the modal harmonic language and contrapuntal textures of the English late Renaissance to achieve a huge emotional and dynamic range.