Composer, cellist, and vocalist Able Selaocoe presents his genre-defying concerto Four Spirits, recorded live with the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon. Commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Seattle Symphony and PhilZuid, Four Spirits reframes the concerto format through a rich tapestry of musical influences rooted in Selaocoe’s South African heritage. Singing in Sotho and Zulu, he interweaves ancestral melodies, improvisation, …

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, present a third installment of their multi-Grammy Award-winning Latin series with an album centering Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz. Inspired by a 16th century African prince who was enslaved in Mexico, Yanga is composed for choir, percussion quartet, and orchestra. Yanga uses African instruments that arrived in Latin America including …

The fifth installment of John Storgårds’s Shostakovich symphony cycle with the BBC Philharmonic contains works written primarily during Shostakovich’s student years. The two orchestral scherzos on the program share links with the later First Symphony, which was composed as a graduation test in composition from the Petrograd Conservatoire. Shostakovich spent two years working on it and the Symphony he eventually …

Max Reger’s 150th anniversary was celebrated in 2023, but his music is not often programmed. During his own lifetime, however, he was much esteemed. Paul Hindemith described him as “the last giant of music,” and Schoenberg promoted his music because “he still remains unfamiliar” and “I consider him a genius.” Written towards the end of his life, Max Reger’s Four …

Marking 70 years since George Enescu’s death, celebrated violinist Charlie Siem and the Philharmonia Orchestra present two of the Romanian composer’s concertante works (Aria and Scherzino and Ballade, Op. 4a) as companion pieces to Brahms’s Violin Concerto conducted by Oleg Caetani. Charlie Siem is one of today’s foremost young violinists with wide-ranging cross-cultural appeal. Siem has appeared with many of …

Creative collaboration is a fundamental aspect of American composer Joel Puckett. The three works receiving their premiere recording here exemplify this spirit, each reflecting synergy between Puckett’s dynamic creative vision and the musicians for whom he composes. Puckett’s new Trumpet Concerto was written for the distinguished jazz trumpeter Sean Jones as an homage to Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, commissioned and …

This album comprises three works by three composers of three different nationalities performed by Finland’s Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra led by artistic director Malin Broman (who is also an accomplished violinist). The Sea Sketches by Welsh composer Grace Williams opens the program, inspired by the beaches of Glamorganshire and by its seascape. Grażyna Bacewicz’s Fourth String Quartet is played here in …

Telemann remains a paradox: the deeper one delves into his oeuvre, the more boundless his legacy seems. The sheer abundance of his orchestral works and concertos seems to grow exponentially with each new publication. Six previously lost overtures from 1736, of which only a single printed copy survives, have unexpectedly resurfaced and are presented here by L’Orfeo Barockorchester. The collection …

The Rheinland-Pfalz State Philharmonic led by Antoni Wit music by the Polish conductor’s countryman Zygmunt Noskowski (1846–1909). Although Noskowski is less well known than his teacher Stanisław Moniuszko or his students Karol Szymanowski and Mieczysław Karłowicz, he was nonetheless the primary exponent of modern symphonic music in Poland for most of the 19th century. He also introduced the idea of …

Sir Andrew Davis was a talented keyboard player as a child and teenager, and after study with Peter Hurford at St Albans he spent four years at the University of Cambridge as organ scholar at King’s College, under Sir David Willcocks. It was this period of his life that sparked his love for the organ works of J.S. Bach, which …

The mother-daughter team of violinist Zina Schiff and conductor Avlana Eisenberg present the music of Alan Hovhaness, one of America’s most prolific composers, with music characterized by a signature synthesis of East and West. Influenced by his Armenian heritage and a fascination with nature and spirituality, he sought to create music “for all people, music which is beautiful and healing.” …

Michael Repper leads the National Philharmonic in a celebration of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – an album of world-premiere recordings commemorating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.. The program features new performance editions of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Ballade in D minor, Op. 4, and the Suite from 24 Negro Melodies. Grammy-nominated violinist Curtis Stewart is featured in the Ballade and in his …

The current volume in this series showcases a vibrant pairing of young soloists with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in concertos by Mozart. The Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat, K. 271 has long been known as the ‘Jeunehomme’ — but it was discovered in 2004 that it was actually composed for Louise Victoire Jenamy. Mozart misspelled her name …

Valentin Silvestrov was forced to leave his native Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022, and his earlier music has an almost prescient quality that seems to express the fate of his homeland. The intimate Violin Concerto and the heartfelt, one-movement Eighth Symphony are notable for their economy of expression and emphasis on beauty, depth and harmony. Silvestorv’s “metaphorical style,” …

Pioneering twentieth-century Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s vibrant and dynamic musical language bridges the gap between neoclassicism and modernism. This second volume of conductor Sakari Oramo’s Bacewicz series features three rarely recorded works. The Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was written in 1949 for the Frédéric Chopin Composers’ Competition, organized by the Polish Composers’ Union to commemorate the centenary of Chopin’s …

Tania León was the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence for two seasons concluding in July 2025. The orchestra’s new album on their in-house label presents four of León’s works which the orchestra has premiered in the UK and Europe including an LPO commission. Horizons (1999) is a shimmering tapestry of asymmetrical rhythms and Latin inflected orchestration. Stride (2020) is a Pulitzer …

The WDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Elena Schwarz present orchestral works by Elsa Barraine, a composer who has long been unjustly neglected. Born in Paris in 1910 and a pupil of Paul Dukas alongside Olivier Messiaen, Barraine won the Prix de Rome in 1929—a remarkable achievement for the fourth woman ever to receive it. The album centers Barraine’s …

Recently awarded the prestigious Brahms Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms Society, Kent Nagano and the Hamburg State Philharmonic, of which he was principal conductor from 2015 until 2025, perform the last two symphonies by the Hamburg-born composer, recorded in concert. The most personal of Johannes Brahms’s four symphonies, the Third is both heroic and deeply troubled with each movement ending …

Wilhelm Furtwängler rose to the most important conductorships available, replacing Richard Strauss at the Staatskapelle Berlin in 1920, and then, following the sudden death of Arthur Nikisch, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. Through the 1930s and ‘40s, his career was defined by his opposition to Nazism, and the determination of the regime to use his international reputation …

During the decade of the 1930s, Florence Price produced two substantial concertos: the romantic Piano Concerto in One Movement and her first violin concerto – an expansive and richly orchestrated work that was apparently never performed during her lifetime. The later Violin Concerto No. 2 was completed just a few months before her death. These three works represent her entire …

Henriëtte Bosmans is considered one of the most important Dutch composers of the first half of the 20th century. Having refused to become a member of the Nazi’s Chamber of Culture, her career was put on hold. This new album from cellist Raphael Wallfisch and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra led by Ed Spanjaard is part of Wallfisch’s survey “Voices …

Following the success of his Beethoven and Schubert recordings, Jordi Savall now presents his first album devoted to music of Robert Schumann and Anton Bruckner. Adopting historically informed performance practices, Le Concert des Nations casts light on a repertoire that has been unfairly forgotten. Starting with Robert Schumann’s Zwickauer Symphony, the period instrument orchestra reveals new colors and ardor. The …

Daniel Ottensamer presents Brahms’ two legendary clarinet sonatas, reworked for clarinet and orchestra by Stephan Koncz, who also conducts the Berlin German Symphony Orchestra on this recording. Koncz’s orchestrations bring these masterful pieces out of the limited space of chamber music, presenting them in a new symphonic light. The album is rounded out by a hidden gem, Walter Rabl’s clarinet …

Klaus Mäkelä conducts Orchestre de Paris in two classic showpieces that premiered in Paris: Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Ravel’s La valse. “Mäkelä is a star, no doubt, and the proof of it is that he makes his players look and sound like stars, too” wrote The Guardian about the BBC Proms performance of the Berlioz last summer, shortly before this …

The internationally acclaimed German label CPO has been enthusiastically filling the niches that larger companies in the industry have sometimes overlooked. The latest release is the label’s sixth album dedicated to the music of Emilie Mayer, and their third in a series presenting the composer’s symphonies with the NDR Radio Philharmonic. Orchestrator Andreas N. Tarkmann reconstructed the lost score of …