Works for piano and voice dominate this week’s new releases. The debut album from BBC New Generation artist Lukas Sternath is a two-disc set featuring masterpieces by Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt; pianist and composer Jonathan Biss focuses on contemporary compositions with an aptly titled new release. Joe Hisaishi recomposes his Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for The Boy and the Heron predominantly for piano. In the vocal world, The New Consort ensemble presents music from across four and a half centuries, while soprano Ying Fang partners with the Manchester Camerata and its Music Director Gábor Takács-Nagy for an album of concert arias and symphonies. Finally, Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble celebrates the festive season with a richly varied program of holiday favorites, historical carols, and inventive arrangements for brass and organ.
New Releases November 10: Piano and Vocal Arrangements
Joe Hisaishi’s Symphonic Suite The Boy and the Heron for piano and orchestra is recomposed from his Golden Globe-nominated original soundtrack for the Academy Award-winning animated film and is presented in its world premiere recording with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Hisaishi was appointed Composer-in-Association in 2024. Rather than using the full orchestral palette, Hisaishi opted for an unobtrusive, minimalist style, full of repeated patterns – notably on the solo piano, supported at different times by an ensemble including strings, brass, tuned percussion, and electronics. Speaking about the process of recomposing his original score, Hisaishi says: “I usually create a suite based on a soundtrack in the same year as a film is released. This time I waited a little longer, and then decided to entirely rewrite the music for the concert hall. The Symphonic Suite is therefore a standalone piece, completely independent from the film.”
Founded and led by baritone Brian Mummert, The New Consort is a vocal ensemble that explores the roles musical ritual and community can play in 21st-century lives. The ensemble draws on a roster of leading early music and contemporary singers and are winners of The American Prize in Chamber Music. Their program for their debut album contrasts two major works for voices across four and a half centuries: Robert White’s The Lamentations of Jeremiah a5, by a Tudor composer whose career was cut short by the bubonic plague, and Jonathan Woody’s Lamentation, a commission by The New Consort receiving its world premiere recording, trading the prophet Jeremiah’s ruined Jerusalem for the contemporary experience of queer life. The album takes its title from a line in Emilia Effie’s poem The Revelation, one of the texts Woody sets: “to eat the fruit of knowledge is to lose your innocence and be flung from the garden forever.”
Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble celebrates the festive season with a richly varied program of holiday favorites, historical carols, and inventive arrangements for brass and organ. Spanning centuries and traditions, the album moves from traditional carols and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite to contemporary holiday stylings inspired by Mannheim Steamroller. Underpinned by Craig Garner’s imaginative settings, these performances balance grandeur, warmth, and playfulness, capturing both the reverence and joy of the Christmas season.
The latest album from pianist, writer, and educator Jonathan Biss features three new solo piano commissions: Tyson Gholston Davis’s …Expansions of Light, Alvin Singleton’s Bed-Stuy Sonata, and Tyshawn Sorey’s For Anthony Braxton. Throughout the new album, Biss explores new possibilities at the piano, as he has done throughout a career marked by commissioning, performing, and recording contemporary music. The possibilities range from from Davis’s response to the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler to Singleton’s freedom of musical gesture and Sorey’s attention to sound and silence. Biss’s accompanying essays connect the new works to his relationships with the composers and his experience of bringing their scores to life.
The debut album by BBC New Generation artist Lukas Sternath is a two-disc set featuring works by Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt, released on NO SILENCE RECORDS, the new label founded by Igor Levit. Sternath first came to international prominence when he won the 2022 ARD International Music Competition, taking home an extraordinary seven prizes. Levit, Sternath’s teacher at the University of Music, Drama & Media in Hanover, Germany as well as a close mentor and friend, gave him complete artistic freedom in shaping the program. The first disc brings together five Schubert songs in Liszt’s celebrated piano transcriptions alongside Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. The second is devoted entirely to Liszt, featuring “Deuxième Année: Italie” from Années de Pèlerinage, culminating in the vast and visionary Fantasia quasi Sonata: Après une lecture du Dante. Lukas Sternath makes his solo recital debut at Chicago Symphony Center in December.
“Mozart, Made in Manchester” has become a flagship project for Manchester Camerata, eliciting five-star reviews, national and international radio support, international tours, and more than three million streams online. Since starting the project in 2016 with Music Director Gábor Takács-Nagy, the orchestra has performed and recorded all of Mozart’s piano concertos with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, and all the horn concertos with Martin Owen. Continuing the much lauded project is this program featuring Symphonies Nos. 36 “Linz” and No 40 in G minor, plus two concert arias with the gifted Chinese soprano Ying Fang: “Misera, dove son!,” K. 369 and “Al desio di chi t’adora,” K. 577.
