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In June 2011, after an absence of a quarter-century, the legendary Maurizio Pollini returned to Dresden's Semperoper to play Brahms's First Piano Concerto under the baton of Christian Thielemann. Not at all surprisingly, they brought the house down.

Along with his friend Caruso, Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) was one of the superstars of the early gramophone era. He was 'the master musician among the violinists of the day' (New York Times); he died 50 years ago (29 January 1962). As a composer, he is famous for his Viennese-style melodies, such as Liebesfreud and Liebesleid, for his notorious pieces 'in the style of' various 18th-century masters (which he passed off as their original works, claiming to have rediscovered them in old manuscripts), and for his arrangements of well-known works by other composers.

This unusual coupling of the violin concertos by Aram Khachaturian and Samuel Barber, entitled Two Souls, is tailor-made for Mikhail Simonyan's exciting DG debut. Born in Novosibirsk, Simonyan has mixed Russian and Armenian parentage, but spent his formative years in the US. Simonyan's close rapport with Kristjan Järvi and his first collaboration with one of the world's best orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra, produce an extraordinarily fresh reading of the two concertos.

Following their album of French music for two pianos, father and son Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy revel in their musical heritage with this dazzling programme by the great composers of Russia. Three of the works have been arranged by Vovka Ashkenazy himself, including Mussorgsky's Night On The Bald Mountain and the album's virtuosic finale, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from his opera Prince Igor. His two-piano arrangement of Glinka's lilting Valse-fantaisie is itself based on Sergei Lyapunov's arrangement for four hands.

This album marks two 'firsts' for Hélène Grimaud - her first live DG recording and her first ever Mozart concerto recording. Hélène Grimaud considers the concerto in A major "probably the most sublime concerto Mozart ever wrote", with a slow movement that is "an extremely deep and painful expression of longing, where you find the real Mozart.".