Contemporary works new to the WFMT music library are featured on this week’s new releases, including world premiere recordings from composer-performers Alexis Ffrench, Max Richter, and the American chamber choir Ensemble Altera. Recent Ryna Opera Center alums tenor Travon D. Walker and pianist Michael Banwarth debut an album featuring a collaboratively written song cycle. Plus, the Manchester Camerata partners with Alexandra Dariescu to present Doreen Carwithen’s Piano Concerto and other orchestral works by British composers, while Jeneba Kanneh-Mason presents an EP of music inspired by Felix Mendelssohn’s famous Songs Without Words.
New Releases October 19: Contemporary Compositions
Alexis Ffrench publicity image. (Photo: Alex Lake)
Formed from twenty-four meticulously crafted piano pieces and intended as a musical companion to the clockwork of everyday life, 24 unveils as an intimate and immersive snapshot of a singular day. Pioneering pianist, composer, and chart-topping classical soul artist Alexis Ffrench gently guides listeners from dawn to dusk – through the quiet of early morning into the busy heart of day and on to the evening’s golden hour. 24 is woven from daydreams, memories of human connection and the desire for authenticity amongst an ever evolving and increasingly simulated digital age. Recorded during ten-days of near-total immersion on an array vintage of grand pianos, upright pianos and organs, the album also features delicate ripples of percussion and a string ensemble featuring harp and upright bass.
In their latest album, Ensemble Altera journeys through wind, earth, water, fire, and quintessence — the ancient idea of a fifth essence. Across five chapters, music from the Renaissance to the present explores these forces not as fixed substances but as living metaphors: breath and inspiration, rootedness and belonging, stillness and flow, passion and transformation, and what may lie beyond the material world. The program pairs choral landmarks with new commissions and fresh arrangements, including music by William Byrd, Charles Villiers Stanford, Ēriks Ešenvalds, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Owain Park, and Rebecca Dale, as well as world-premiere recordings of music by Michael Garrepy and Daniel Gledhill, winner of Ensemble Altera’s 2021 Composition Competition. Directed by its founder Christopher Lowrey, the fully professional chamber choir is known for imaginative programming and a warm, focused transatlantic sound. The Four Elements has already been hailed as BBC Music Magazine‘s 2026 Choral Choice, “Nature’s variety captured in sensuous songs. Ensemble Altera’s superior singing brings the elements to life.
The Manchester Camerata led by John Andrews present a program spotlighting four distinct 20th century British composers — Ruth Gipps, Doreen Carwithen, William Alwyn, and Elizabeth Maconchy — whose works chart an alternative path through an era often confined to either pastoral lyricism or modernist edginess. Featuring soloists Alex Mitchell (viola), Alexandra Dariescu (piano), and Rachel Clegg (cor anglais), these performances illuminate music of remarkable individuality and emotional range. Fram Gipps’s folk-inflected fantasy Jane Grey and Carwithen’s long-neglected Piano Concerto to Alywn’s Autumn Legend and the searching power of Maconchy’s Life Story, this album reveals a British musical landscape far richer and more adventurous than history has long suggested.
Jeneba Kanneh-Mason presents a five-track EP traces the evolution of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” tradition across generations, musical styles, and genres. Continuing Kanneh-Mason’s passion for championing Black women composers, the acclaimed young pianist follows one of Felix Mendelssohn’s Op. 62 Lieder ohne Worte with two of Florence Price’s Songs Without Words and Margaret Bonds’s “The Bells,” the second movement from her Spiritual Suite for Piano. The EP concludes with the aria “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix (Softly awakes my heart)” from Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Samson and Delilah. Nina Simone famously performed her own arrangement of the aria as a solo piano piece during her 1963 debut solo concert at Carnegie Hall, enriching the piece with embellishments and improvisatory flourishes. Jeneba honors this seminal artist with a transcription of that live performance.
Tenor Travon D. Walker and pianist Michael Banwarth – both recent alums of the Ryan Opera Center – jointly present their debut album featuring three song cycles, recorded at Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston, Illinois, with engineering by WFMT’s own Sam Genualdi. In the album liner notes, the artists say that while discussing the repertoire for the album, “there was really no iteration that didn’t involve” Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39 on poetry of Joseph von Eichendorf. The program includes André Caplet’s rare three-movement cycle Paroles à l’absente (only the second commercial recording) and the album’s titular work, to be seen, an original collaborative song cycle by Walker and Banwarth. The album concludes with the artist’s arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark,” a song the duo have performed together in concert, chosen for its simple, bittersweet quality to unite the themes of the three cycles.
Pianist, composer, and producer Max Richter presents new music drawn from his original score for MADDADDAM, a three-act post-apocalyptic ballet epic choreographed by Wayne McGregor inspired by Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed dystopian novel trilogy: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam. Collaborating with the 12 Ensemble string orchestra, Tenebrae (choir led by Nigel Short), and guitarist John Parricelli, Richter blends orchestral writing, electronics, processed field recordings, choir, and piano to create an immersive sonic journey. Themes of ecological collapse, technological acceleration, and resilience run throughout, with recurring piano motifs providing moments of reflection amid dense, cinematic soundscapes.
