This wound up being a spectacular year for elaborate, lavishly packaged reissues. Given all the fabulous classical box sets that appeared this year, you'd think we were in some kind of boom era for ...

Naysayers be damned. Classical music on record continues to thrive, or so it seems judging from the plethora of boxed sets that have come our way this year. As ever, milestone birthdays were ...

This is a paean to Erato. Not the ancient Greek muse of lyric poetry, but the French classical music record label. Founded in 1953, Erato is now owned by Warner Classics, and thank goodness for that.