Elgar: Violin Concerto; Vaughan Williams: Lark As- cending. Kennedy, CBSO/Simon Rattle (EMI)

The violinist formerly known as Nige (henceforth just "Kennedy") was always an individual recording artist. His Elgar Violin Concerto takes flight with a freedom and impetuosity more associated with the concert hall than the recording studio. In a full and close EMI production, Simon Rattle's CBSO matches the soloist both at his moments of white-hot intensity and inner-directed reflection. Tempo choices incline towards spaciousness, but Kennedy's approach is to make every note count; and Rattle's judicious negotiation of the music's incessant tempo adjustments, retains a sense of thrust.

Vaughan Williams' Lark, however, labours to ascend at Kennedy's slow speeds.

Michael Dervan

Musica Non Grata. (BMG Melodiya, mid price)

Melodiya's rewarding Musica Non Grata series sets out to document music that was officially unwelcome in the Soviet Union. The first five discs range widely. There's the disturbed orchestral ache of the Georgian, Giya Kancheli, whose form of mourning startlingly juxtaposes a drift of gentle haunting beauty with eruptions of savage bluntness; the extraordinary, insistent, bleak, cluster-laden obsessions of Galina Ustvolskaya; the drifting tendrils of Valentin Silvestrov's atavistic post-avant-garde melodic fecundity, suggestive of both dislocation and coherence; the more familiar mysticism and invariable instrumental refinement of Sofia Gubaidulina; and, lastly, a cross-section of works by six little-known men active in the 1920s, when the explorations and adventures born of the new order had yet to suffer repression.

Michael Dervan

Handel: "The Rival Queens": opera arias and duets (Hyperion) In the 1720s the Royal Academy of Music in London boasted two superb sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordini, who - having first appeared together playing rival lovers of Alexander the Great, were dubbed "The rival queens". Somebody at Hyperion had the brilliant idea of collecting some of the period's showpieces and getting the label's own two super sopranos, Catherine Bott and Emma Kirkby, to record them under the baton of Roy Goodman with the Brandenburg Consort. The result is nothing if not regal: an hour-and-a-half of music that might be summed up by a line from Princess Rossane's lovely aria in Act II of Handel's Alessandro: "Breezes, springs and pleasing shadows".

Arminta Wallace