Curating the best new classical recordings
There’s always wonderful music to discover, from instrumental to vocal music, new recordings of old favorites, or albums featuring cutting-edge contemporary works. Discover more about each selection below.
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George Szell in Europe
With Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti and Ferenc Fricsay, George Szell (1897-1970) was one of several great Hungarian conductors who deeply influenced the art of conducting in the 20th century. He left Europe in 1939 for the United States, where he had a brilliant career. With the Cleveland Orchestra, which he conducted from 1946 until his death in 1970, he achieved ...
Pavel Kolesnikov: Music of Louis Couperin
Pavel Kolesnikov, 2012 Laureate of the Honens Prize for Piano, gave his Wigmore Hall debut at the beginning of 2013. Equally well-suited to the demands of the French Baroque as to the high Romanticism of Tchaikovsky and Chopin, his attentive musicianship yields revelatory results in the music of Louis Couperin. A composer, harpsichordist, organist, and viol player, Couperin was, after ...
The Royal Wedding: The Official Album
Decca Records has released the official recording of the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Ms. Meghan Markle. Having recorded the entire service live at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, every piece of music, the readings, blessings and the vows are included. The musical highlight of the moving and joyous ceremony was British cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, one of the most exciting ...
Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6 – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Manze
Andrew Manze’s interpretations of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies have met with acclaim from audiences and critics alike. This third album in the series contains two masterpieces. The Fifth Symphony draws on material from The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Sixth Symphony stunned the audience at its premiere – some tried to explain the work’s last movement as depicting a nuclear wasteland. Vaughan Williams responded, ...
Rachel Barton Pine & Jory Vinikour: Bach Violin Sonatas
Violinist Rachel Barton Pine and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, critically acclaimed artists of international renown – and also close friends – record together for the first time on this album of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas for violin and harpsichord. The artists approach these works as Bach intended: as trio sonatas with equally important roles for the violin and the harpsichord’s treble ...
Living Music: New Chamber Music for Flute
Contemporary music is alive and well in innumerable forms and genres, and the flexibility and colorful sonorities of the flute have attracted composers of every style. This collection of beautiful chamber music with flute is performed by award-winning soloist Alice K. Dade and includes four premiere recordings. These take us from Aaron Jay Kernis’s Air, the composer’s ‘love letter in ...
The Romantic Piano Concerto: Ferdinand Ries
Once celebrated as one of the finest piano-performers of the 1820s, Ferdinand Ries is now remembered chiefly for his association with Beethoven. Volume 75 of Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series highlights Ries’s own Piano Concertos Nos. 8 and 9 and Introduction and Polonaise. Piers Lane is joined by Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now in performances that make a persuasive ...
Paul Lewis: Haydn Piano Sonatas
Paul Lewis is internationally regarded as one of the leading musicians of his generation. His cycles of core piano works by Beethoven and Schubert have received unanimous critical and public acclaim worldwide, and consolidated his reputation as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of the central European classical repertoire. This recording is the first of a series of discs of ...
David Aaron Carpenter: Motherland
For his second Warner Classics album, David Aaron Carpenter – “a star violist” in the words of the Los Angeles Times – brings together concertos by Dvořák, Bartók, Walton and a dance cycle by contemporary composer Alexey Shor. Carpenter identifies a connecting theme of “a longing for the homeland … a reverence for native musical folk tunes and language.” He ...
Anderson & Roe Piano Duo: Mother, A Musical Tribute
Described as “the most dynamic duo of this generation” (San Francisco Classical Voice), “rock stars of the classical music world” (Miami Herald), “exhilarating” (Gramophone), and “the very model of complete 21st century musicians” (The Washington Post), Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are revolutionizing the piano duo experience for the 21st century. Their album “Mother” features musical compositions that pay tribute to ...
Frederic Hand: Samatureya
Longtime Metropolitan Opera guitarist and lutenist, versatile and award-winning composer, and mentor and teacher to generations of guitarists, Frederic Hand has enjoyed an impressive and impactful career on many levels. His latest release, “Samatureya,” features his signature brand of compositions and his fluid, expressive playing. His compositions defy easy categorization – they draw from various styles including early music, Irish ...
Bach: Mass in B minor – Les Arts Florissants
One of the supreme monuments of western sacred music, Bach’s Mass in B minor has been constantly re-examined by successive generations of performers. The questions it raises for musicologists and conductors are many and varied. Each of them strives to give his or her own reading with the necessary humility. It was in this frame of mind that William Christie ...
Marc-André Hamelin: Late Works of Schubert
Pianist Marc-André Hamelin is ranked among the finest pianists in the world for his unrivaled blend of musicianship and virtuosity. He has been acclaimed not only for his intrepid exploration of rarities from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, but also for his probing insights into the standard repertoire. On this recital featuring Schubert’s sublime last piano sonata and second ...
Mahler: Symphony No. 6 – Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
Albert Camus once wrote, “when I describe what the catastrophe of modern man looks like, music comes into my mind – the music of Gustav Mahler.” If asked to specify a particular work, it is quite possible that Camus would have proposed his Symphony No. 6. Conductor Osmo Vänskä has a reputation for engaging with even the most iconic scores at ...
Nikolai Lugansky: Rachmaninoff 24 Preludes
Rachmaninoff took the genre of the prelude to its highest degree of perfection with his boundless musical invention and fearsome technical demands. In his first recording for Harmonia Mundi, Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky brilliantly meets the challenge, offering a program of the finest gems in his repertory of choice. BBC Music Magazine said, “Lugansky captures the depth of emotion and ...
Grigory Krotenko: Travels with Goliath
Josef Kämpfer (1735–?1810) was a cavalry officer in the Hungarian army and a self-taught double bass virtuoso and double bass designer. He led a peripatetic life moving through musical circles at the highest levels in Austria, Germany, Paris, London and St. Petersburg. Kämpfer met Leopold Mozart, the Haydn brothers, Vaňhal, and many of the most famous musicians of the day. Russian ...
Liza Ferschtman: Music of Korngold & Bernstein
Dutch violinist Liza Ferschtman is known for her passionate performances, interesting programs and communicative qualities on stage. She is equally at home on the concert stage with concertos, chamber music, recitals, and solo works. In 2006, she received the highest accolade awarded to a musician in the Netherlands, the Dutch Music Prize. On this album, Ferschtman pairs Korngold’s late-Romantic Violin ...
Trio Vitruvi: Schubert
Schubert’s great E-flat major piano trio had its first performance in 1827 in Vienna. Trio Vitruvi returns to Schubert’s gem, giving us the original (longer) version of the score in an impassioned reading, along with the beautiful “Notturno.” Violinist Niklas Walentin, pianist Alexander McKenzie, and cellist Jacob la Cour have performed critically acclaimed concerts around the world. They won both ...
Rachmaninoff: Symphonies – London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev
Rachmaninoff’s three symphonies reflect different stages of his life and creative development, with the later Symphonic Dances proving to be his last work. United by their unashamed romanticism, they also share his signature “tag” – the Dies irae plainchant, a grim reminder of mortality that pervades Rachmaninoff’s music. They are accompanied here by two works of his fellow countryman, Mily ...
Orion Weiss: Presentiment
Presentiment by Orion Weiss is an album of large-scale works by Granados, Janáček and Scriabin directly and indirectly addressing a world about to be catapulted into the dread of global war, despair and triumph. “The new century,” Weiss says, “had already flooded the romantic aesthetic of the old with anxiety, nostalgia, and confusion. These ominous musical stories go even further, with some ...
