Russian Futurism Vol 3 (Arte Nova, two-disc set, £9.98)

If you associate futurism in music with Russolo and his noise machines, you may wonder at the nostalgic traditionalism of the disc devoted to orchestral and chamber works by Mikhail Gnesin (18831957). I certainly did. There's no such problem with Alexander Mossolov (1900-1973), famous for his noisy orchestral depiction of an Iron Foundry, who is aptly represented by the string of loosely-bundled but characterful, indeed often striking ideas which make up his First String Quartet. This work is a real find. Like Mossolov, Lev Knipper (1898-1974) retreated from his avant-garde position of the 1920s, and the modernism of his Third Quartet seems barely skin-deep. The altogether more exploratory Quartets 1 and 3 of Nikolai Roslavets (1881-1944) grip more firmly in this musically fascinating, well-played, but poorly-documented collection. Michael Dervan

Solti: "The Last Recording" (Bartok, Kodaly, Weiner) (Decca)

Georg Solti's last recording, made just months before his death last September, was planned as a gesture of gratitude to his teachers, Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Leo Weiner. The allegory of alienation in Bartok's Cantata Profana (a man who brought up his nine sons to hunt loses them when they are turned into stags) is one that Solti related first to the composer, and, in later life, to himself. A typically tightly-wrought performance of the knotty cantata with the Hungarian Radio Choir and the Budapest Festival Orchestra is coupled with an incandescent reading of Kodaly's fervent Psalmus Hungaricus and, in lighter, more conservative idiom, an early, gently folksy Serenade by Weiner, the teacher to whom Solti always felt he owed the most. Michael Dervan

Vivaldi: "Ottone In Villa" (Chandos)

This recording would be a treat under any circumstances - agile young voices, pin-sharp playing from the Collegium Musicum 90 under Richard Hickox, a stream of impassioned recitatives and glorious arias - but when you pause to consider how many recordings of Vivaldi's operas there are in your local record shop, as opposed to recordings of the dreaded Four Seasons, it becomes a thing of pure, unadulterated joy. The plot involves two sets of lovers, with plenty of infidelity, jealousy, cross-dressing and hopping in and out of baths, not to mention the odd risque line about sparse garments clinging to white limbs to keep listeners from nodding off, but in truth the music is so exuberant that there's little danger of that anyhow. It's unfair to single one voice out of such a nippy ensemble affair, but Nancy Argenta, in the castrato role of Caio, is a consistent delight. A triumph for Chandos, right to the sumptuous packaging. Arminta Wallace