This week centers women as highly-skilled performers, composers, and conductors of classical music. Gail Gillespie, one of the pioneers of Chicago’s burgeoning Early Music scene, returns with an album of Renaissance lute music. Guest conductor Karina Canellakis leads the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a celebrated recording of two profound Tchaikovsky symphonies. New albums just in time for the holidays highlight new twists on timeless classics: from horn player Sarah Willis’ high-energy Cuban-infused interpretations, to Ensemble Altera’s arrangements of Christmas music for women’s chorus. Also included this week is a new album by Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire and Sascha Goetzel, exploring works of three composers that were once blacklisted.
New Releases Nov. 4: Women’s Voices
Gail Gillispie is one of the pioneers of Chicago’s burgeoning Early Music scene. She founded the Renaissance vocal ensemble The Scholars of Cambrai and has been a member of the Venere Lute Quartet, one of the nations few professional lute ensembles. She has also performed with the Hueglas Ensemble, American Medieval Players, and the Newberry Consort. In her first solo recording, Gillispie shares her passion for and research in The Marsh Lute Book, a major English manuscript of Renaissance lute music complied around 1595 and named for Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, who acquired it. The manuscript contains over 160 pieces of music by prominent composers of the era as well as many anonymous works. “Imagine fining such a collection, full of intriguing objects and specimens, many of them apparently unique – but mostly unlabeled, without provenance, unorganized, and in some cases damaged,” writes Gillispie in the program notes. “Translate this image into a musical context, and you have a reasonable description of the Marsh lute book.”
Recorded live at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, this new release on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s proprietary label presents two of Tchaikovsky’s most profound symphonies: a revelatory account of the Fifth, with its shifting balance between fate and triumph, and a searingly personal reading of Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”). The Times praised the “explosive chemistry between this conductor and orchestra” while The Arts Desk declared “the LPO has a real treasure in Canellakis.” Together, they continue the Orchestra’s rich tradition of powerful Tchaikovsky performances, offering a recording that is both steeped in legacy and brimming with new life. This new release marks the first album from the LPO label devoted entirely to Guest Conductor Karina Canellakis leading the orchestra. Canellakis is scheduled to conduct Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in April 2026.
Following the success of the popular Mozart y Mambo project, Sarah Willis, horn-player of the Berliner Philharmonic, and The Sarahbanda release their first album on Deutsche Grammophon. Together they inject the colourful, contagious energy of Cuban music into a selection of timeless holiday classics. With their trademark genre-defying approach, the album includes works by Bach and Tchaikovsky – also re-imagined with Cuban flair. “Cuban Christmas is a celebration of culture, connection, and the music that makes the season magical,” says Willis. “I truly hope it brings as much happiness to your home as it brought to mine while creating it.”
Ensemble Altera led by Christopher Lowrey presents their third release on Alpha, an album celebrating the female voice and the Christmas season. The program is a kaleidoscopic selection made up of sacred music (settings of the Magnificat and Ave Maria) and carols composed by women with works by Hildegard von Bingen, Imogen Holst, Germaine Tailleferre, Cecilia McDowall, Joanna Marsh, Barbara Strozzi, Elizabeth Poston, and a world premiere by Kerensa Briggs. Male composers are also included, with works by John Rutter and Benjamin Britten’s famous Ceremony of Carols, a work now generally performed by boys’ choirs but which was originally written for the women of the Fleet Street Choir. Altera and the harpist Li Shan Tan perform this magical and spellbinding music with delight.
The three composers featured on this recording, remarkable for expressiveness and virtuosity, were all deeply rooted in fin-de-siècle Vienna. They were banned by the dictatorships of the 1930s, then blacklisted in the aftermath of the Second World War by the young European avant-garde. Only in recent years has the beauty of their works been newly appreciated. Vienna-born conductor Sascha Goetzel writes: “With Korngold, Schreker and Krenek, we’re not just hearing music – we’re entering a dialogue between past and present, tradition and rebellion, myth and modernity […] Korngold embodies the emotional sincerity and creative ambition of the late Romantic tradition. Schreker immerses us in the subconscious – mythical, unstable, and rich in feeling. Krenek breaks through the façade, injecting irony, jazz and fragmentation into the orchestral form […] In their own ways, each composer pushes back against inherited conventions to discover new languages of sound.”
