Rising stars appear alongside great musical paragons on this week’s new releases roundup. Oliver Talukder, winner of Cedille Records’ 2025 Emerging Artist Competition, explores music for oboe, flute, clarinet, and oboe d’amore on his debut album. Canadian-American cellist Elinor Frey performs and conducts Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s three cello concertos with the Accademia de’ Dissonanti. Minnesota-based mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski presents her debut solo recording with pianist Timothy Lovelace, an active recitalist who heads the Collaborative Piano program at the University of Minnesota. Legendary violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter presents works by two composers close to her heart, one of which features one of the scholarship recipients of her foundation. Finally, one of the world’s most famous piano trios presents the fifth album in their acclaimed Beethoven for Three series.
New Releases September 1: Icons and Emerging Artists
Born in Chicago, Oliver Talukder is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and teaching artist of Mexican and Bengali heritage and winner of Cedille’s 2025 Emerging Artist Competition. Joined by pianist Moriah Trenk, Talukder’s solo debut album on Cedille Records celebrates family, identity, home, and the many musical traditions that have shaped his life. “My home was filled with the aroma of my father’s biryani, the sounds of boleros, salsa, and Bollywood film soundtracks, and conversations among my family in English, Spanish, and Bengali. My neighborhood reflected that same richness,” Talukder recounts. “Long before I understood it, my ears were being trained by different languages, rhythms, and musical traditions.” Performing on oboe, English horn, flute, and piccolo, Talukder showcases his remarkable versatility in works by Jeffrey Agrell, Marina Dranishnikova, Alyssa Morris, Florence Price, Reena Esmail, and Arturo Márquez.
Canadian-American cellist Elinor Frey performs and conducts Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s three cello concertos with the Accademia de’ Dissonanti. These dramatic works, rich in turbulent exchanges yet also in tender moments, bear witness to CPE Bach’s fiery imagination, where emotion and melody take precedence. In Bach’s time, personalizing a performance was both common and expected. The question of “how a cellist premiering these works would have approached these concertos” lies at the heart of this recording. Drawing on a vocabulary of ornamentation and melodic analysis derived from the music of the composer and his contemporaries, Frey has reconstructed the social milieu and instrumental practice of Bach’s time, in order to approach the way in which this music was once heard and felt.
Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma present the fifth album in their acclaimed Beethoven for Three series welcoming celebrated violist Antoine Tamestit into the ensemble for the first time. The program brings together two defining masterpieces from Beethoven’s heroic period: the Symphony No. 3,”Eroica,” illustrating a journey from struggle to triumph; and the Leonore Overture No. 3, capturing the vivid drama of the composer’s only opera Fidelio. Both works mark the expansion of Classical form, paving the way toward the early Romantic era. Following his arrangements of the Symphonies Nos. 1, 4, and 6, pianist and composer Shai Wosner returns to the Beethoven for Three series with this program’s arrangements for piano quartet.
Anne-Sophie Mutter presents works by two composers close to her heart: André Previn (1929–2019) and Sebastian Currier (b.1959). Mutter was married to Previn for several years and remained close friends until his death. As a jazz pianist, conductor, and composer, Previn was a great and multifaceted talent who opened new musical worlds for her. The program features his Piano Trio (2009) and Second Violin Concerto (2010), a work scored for solo violin, string orchestra, and harpsichord in a nod to Baroque music. A duo for violin and double bass, Ringtone Variations by Sebastian Currier completes the album. Mutter commissioned the work for her to perform with double bassist Roman Patkoló, one of the scholarship recipients of her foundation. Currier explains the piece’s title, “I wanted to work with material that is very simple and familiar to everyone. This is the only piece where, if a phone went off in the audience, suddenly you have a new variation!”
Minnesota-based mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski presents her debut solo recording with pianist Timothy Lovelace, an active recitalist who heads the Collaborative Piano program at the University of Minnesota. Regularly heard as soloist with Music of the Baroque, Osowski is an internationally recognized interpreter of song literature. She received the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Prize at the 2019 Wigmore Hall International Song Competition for the best performance of English song by a British composer. In 2017, she became the first American prize winner at Thomas Quasthoff’s International Das Lied Competition in Heidelberg, Germany, earning Second Prize and the Richard Tauber Prize for her interpretation of Schubert. Osowski and Lovelace’s Schubert album features 19 songs on themes of nature: lakes, rushing streams, the rising moon, stars, flowers, birdsong.
