Classical musicians have always recognised the musicality and originality of The Beatles’ songs, Leonard Bernstein declaring the Lennon-McCartney composing team ‘the Schuberts of our time’. This sequel to Peter Breiner’s multi-platinum Beatles Go Baroque (Naxos 8555010) takes the original concept even further, keeping 18th-century masterpieces such as Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Bach’s famously stylish and beautiful Violin Concerto no.1 largely intact, elegantly combining them with The Beatles’ most enduring melodies to create a joyously genuine 21st-century mashup.

Peter Breiner’s Beatles Go Baroque (8555010/8990050) is by far his most successful project. Re-recorded and re-released by Naxos in 2000, this title still sells a few thousand copies a year even today, and is frequently performed and broadcast live worldwide. The millions of fans of this recording and its close relative Elvis Goes Baroque (8990054) will leap at the chance to add this new release to their collections.

Fanfare wrote of the previous release: ‘It says something about the quality of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songs that they continue to inspire discs like this one. Each Beatles Concerto grosso contains four to six movements, each based on a particular song by the Beatles. This [is] thoroughly enjoyable… Beatles Go Baroque will give you pleasure.’

With 30 years more experience and a more ambitious concept of uniting highly popular existing baroque works by Vivaldi and Bach with whole sequences of Beatles songs, such as Abbey Road in the last section of the programme, Breiner considers this series to be even better than the first.

Peter Breiner conducts his own carefully selected chamber orchestra in this fine recording, made in the glorious acoustic of the Great Church in Bratislava, Slovakia.