Somewhere in the intersecting corridors of jazz, modernist composition, Scando-folk and early church music, there’s a small interior chamber that’s not quite silent, and this is what you’ll find there.

Blixa Bargeld's collaboration with Italian composer Teho Teardo finds him in fine fettle on a group of typically sardonic songs set to unusual string and electronic arrangements performed with The Balanescu Quartet.

Maurice Gendron, who taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School, was allegedly a sadist who abused his young students

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“When life goes wrong,” advises Carla Bruni, “try for a little French song” – commending their ability to transport one to Paris. With simple guitar accompaniment akin to ukelele, it's warmly welcoming, and entirely indicative of the mood of Little French Songs as a whole.

The Russian composer Victor Kissine's work has been accurately described as possessing a “reticent musical language”, a characteristic skilfully demonstrated by Gidon Kremer's Kremerata Baltica on this album of three chamber-music premieres.

A third composer hovers, ghost-like, in pianist Cheng's beguiling recital with the Calder Quartet.

Virtuosi seem to know what they must do from an early age: in Alisa Weilerstein's case, her first “cello” was made from a cereal box and a toothbrush, when she was just two. Since then, she's played with conductors such as Mehta, Dudamel and, here, Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin.

A Fine Frenzy is the nom-de-disque of Californian singer-songwriter Alison Sudol, whose gently keening vocals invoke a strain of Pacific coastal wyrdness.

In homage to Bach, Benjamin Britten originally planned to write six cello suites for his friend Rostropovich, but was able to complete only three before his death in 1976.

He was a gifted cellist, and his work remained rooted in the practicalities of performance

Better known as one-third of post-rockers State River Widening, David Sheppard here collaborates with producer Chris Leary as Snow Palms, a percussion-based unit whose creations owe much to the mallet music of Steve Reich, Moondog and Indonesian gamelan orchestras.

Partnered here with the following year's "Cello Concerto" , Dvorák's Symphony No. 9 has a broad-brush scope and panache that lends itself perfectly to the detailed, focused approach of Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Their interpretation raises new questions: Dvorák may have claimed negro and Native American influences on the work, but reflecting the tendentious ascription of "New World", here it's more the pioneer spirit that infuses the symphony, with its widescreen strings anticipating a century of Western movie vistas, and its can-do bustle suggestive more of colonising settlers than natives. And isn't that the cavalry summoned by those horns?

Cellist Sol Gabetta's playing, according to pianist Hélène Grimaud, is characterised by the “light and warmth and vitality” indicated by her first name, qualities not often associated with the instrument.