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Available in various formats, with sample tracks at www. 2l. no, this Mozart album has featured as a reference in more than one HFN hardware review, and was this year remastered in conjunction with Bob Stuart using MQA technology. It is certainly a fine production with stable balances, an intimate scale, realistic string timbres and just a hint of decay as movements end.

Knopfler’s eighth solo album mixes rock, Celtic and country influences, and more than a measure of introspection, providing a ‘spot the reference’ game for the casual observer and fans alike. There’s more than a hint of Local Hero here and there – well, quite a lot actually – and his homage to Beryl Bainbridge is pure ‘Sultans Of Swing’, unlikely though that sounds. Inspired by his time touring with Bob Dylan – notably in ‘Silver Eagle’ – this is Knopfler as storyteller, from Bainbridge to poet Basil Bunting, whom he met when he was a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. Trouble is, Knopfler’s writing, scoring, and performance are so distinctive that it can sound like there’s not much new here, even though the sound quality of the stripped-down recording is gorgeous.

There’s obviously something of a blooming of Nordic double-bass player/composers with solo albums at the moment, for here we have Norwegian ‘big fiddle’ virtuoso Mats Eilertsen with a scintillating set of self-composed pieces originally part of a collection commissioned for the 2014 Vossa Jazz Festival, and evolved on the road to create this ensemble album played by a septet. And you can tell the musicians have been working closely to develop the recordings here, so well do they connect in an expressive mélange of brass and woodwind, pianos both acoustic and electric, some superb guitar-work by long-time Eilertsen collaborator Thomas T Dahl, and of course the composer’s own bass. The music is understated, mesmeric and consistently captivating, and – despite our reservations in the lab panel below – instruments still sound crisp, clear and natural. AE Sound Quality: 90% Hi-Fi News Lab Report While this is certainly a 96kHz rendering and one that avoids peak-level overload, spectral analysis reveals a clump of (digital?) spuriae around 30kHz [see graph].

96kHz/24-bit WAV, ALAC, FLAC*, Naim CD188 (supplied by www. naimlabel. com) Max Raptor – a four piece punk rock band formed in 2006 in Burton upon Trent – has released a clutch of singles and an eight-track mini-album Portraits [Naim label] since touring with The Stranglers in 2010. Mother’s Ruin is the band’s first proper album, released Sept ’13.

Melphi is a Dutch quartet, formed by pianist Rogier Telderman in 2010 and curiously named after the psychiatrist in The Sopranos. Through The Looking Glass is the band’s debut outing, comprising mostly Telderman compositions, with lyrics by the group’s singer Lotte van Drunen. Bassist Jurriaan Dekker and drummer Willem van der Krabben complete the combo, their virtuosity shining through the set’s collection of enchanting tracks. It’s a nice recording too, the electric bass underpinning the combo’s moody, melodic, jazz-inspired songs to great effect.

This is an intended celebration of the music of Clara Schumann – five pieces – and the Schumanns’ relationship with the young Brahms, represented here by his Op. 9 Variations (where Sasaki is quite outclassed by Barry Douglas on Chandos). So why is the young Japanese-American pianist’s debut recital entitled Obsidian? Because it includes a seven-part dramatic piece, Obsidian Liturgy, composed for her last year by Max Grafe – 2016 marking 140th/160th anniversaries of the Schumanns’ deaths. As a private gesture, fine, but 10.