Renowned horn player Felix Klieser’s eighth solo album explores Italian opera arias, film music, and song alongside I Solisti di Pavia. Another famed soloist, Pacho Flores, presents world premiere recordings of Latin American trumpet concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. World premiere recordings are also featured: tenor Nicholas debuts new music with collaborators Myra Huang and The Jasper Quartet, while a new commission from Caroline Shaw compliments Beethoven’s third piano concerto.
New Releases Apr 28: Felix Klieser, Pacho Flores, and more
Felix Klieser (Photo: Julia Wesely)
The latest release from tenor Nicholas Phan features his regular collaborator, the outstanding pianist Myra Huang, and The Jasper Quartet in world premiere recordings of works by Vivian Fung and Patrick Castillo alongside songs by Schubert, Ives, and Vaughan Williams. Timed to coincide with World Earth Day, the program explores humanity’s interaction with nature. Franz Schubert’s songs evoke images of water, stillness, and solitude as mirrors of human emotion. Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, drawing on A. E. Housman’s poetry, places the individual within vast cycles of time and landscape which persist beyond human joy and grief alike. In Ives’s Housatonic at Stockbridge, memories, hymns, and the river blend together into a shimmering meditation on transcendence. Patrick Castillo’s Skyline Palimpsest is an homage to New York City that reflects on how nature’s effects may shape the future of the metropolis. The title track by Canadian-born composer Vivian Fung, pairs Claire Wahmanholm’s poem “O” – which has been described as a lament, an elegy, and a clarion call to action – with Gen Z-ers urgent written responses to climate change.
Venezuelan trumpet virtuoso and composer Pacho Flores presents world premiere recordings of Latin American trumpet concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under their chief conductor Domingo Hindoyan. Flores and Hindoyan’s tangible musical chemistry stems from a friendship going back to their time in the Simon Bolivar Orchestra. The title work is Flores’s own vibrant and rhythmic flugelhorn concerto which he premiered in 2022. The album pairs Albares with two other concertos: Salseando by Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra, which Flores premiered to acclaim in 2020; and Altar de Bronce (Altar of Bronze) by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, another work premiered by Flores in 2023.
Violist Timothy Ridout and pianist Jonathan Ware present works by friends and colleagues working side by side in the musical melting pot of fin de siècle Paris. The centerpiece of the album is César Franck’s Violin Sonata of 1886 performed in Paul-Louis Neuberth’s 1919 arrangement for viola. The program also features Léon Honnoré’s Morceau de concert, premiered in 1904 by viola pupils at the Paris Conservatoire where the instrument had only been admitted to the curriculum 10 years earlier. Transcriptions of beloved mélodies by Gabriel Fauré, George Enescu’s Concertstück, and Henri Büsser’s stormy Appassionato in C-sharp minor flesh out this thoughtful program.
Renowned horn player Felix Klieser’s eighth solo album explores Italian opera arias, film music, and song. Kleiser is joined by the Italian orchestra I Solisti di Pavia, recorded in the famous Teatro Fraschini at Pavia. The program features some of the most beloved opera arias by Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, as well as Italian songs like “O Sole Mio” and Nino Rota’s film music from The Godfather. All tracks have been newly arranged for Felix Klieser and the ensemble.
Jonathan Biss concludes his Beethoven/5 commissioning project bringing to a close one of the most ambitious and innovative Beethoven release series of the 21st century. Over the course of five years, Biss selected a composer to write a piano concerto in response to one of Beethoven’s. The final installment of the project, featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malin Broman, pairs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with a new work by Caroline Shaw. Watermark is a reimagination of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto through both direct quotation and subtle reflections of its harmonic language, creating a dialogue between past and present. Shaw “imagines Beethoven imagining it, and in doing so, creates something wholly original.”
