Magdalena Kozena (mezzo soprano), Graham Johnson (piano): Love Songs (Deutsche Grammophon)

Some singers have the gift that their every utterance and breath seem to form immediately into music. Czech mezzo Magdalena Kozena, a singer best known on disc for her work in early music, certainly manages to create that impression in her selection of songs by Dvorak (including his Opp 2 and 83), Martinu (a diverse cross-section) and Janacek (Moravian Folk Poetry in Songs). The directness of Dvorak's folk-inspired settings, apparently artless and compact, was a model for his successors: only three of the 42 songs here stray beyond three minutes, the average lasting just over 90 seconds. Martinu's are the least well known (some only rediscovered in 1996), and show a remarkable stylistic continuity with the earlier composers, but also some tinges of jazz, in the 1932 Lullaby. A charming collection.

Heifetz plays Beethoven and Brahms (Naxos Historical)

This is the third issue this year of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in Naxos's valuable, bargain-priced historical series, following on the accounts by Kreisler and Huberman. Heifetz's studio recordings were made with two of the great conductors of the day, the Brahms with Koussevitzky and the Boston SO in 1939, the Beethoven with Toscanini and the NBCSO in 1940. The straight-down-the-line, no-frills Beethoven remains controversial - brusque, stripped bare, if you don't like it go to the spur-of-the-moment Huberman for attitude in abundance. The Brahms is also delivered in Heifetz's taut, no-nonsense manner, but the music breathes more freely, with Koussevitzky a far more sympathetic and accommodating partner. The new transfers of these classic recordings are more veiled, less edgy than those on RCA, which some listeners will find advantageous to the soloist.

Michael Collins plays Mozart and Beethoven (Deutsche Grammophon)

It's a far cry from the world of Heifetz and Toscanini to Michael Collins and the Russian National Orchestra under Mikhail Pletnev. Why the comparison? Because Pletnev has arranged the Beethoven Violin Concerto for clarinet, and Collins has now recorded it, coupled with his first venture at the Mozart on disc, which he plays on a basset clarinet (giving one work compressed in range from the familiar version, the other expanded). The long first movement of the Beethoven, rewriting and all, seems very wide of the mark, the clarinet like a singer seriously miscast in an opera. No fault attaches to the soloist, and although things work better thereafter, the enterprise is already lost. With Collins at the top of his form, the Mozart is the performance to acquire this disc for.