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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Unraveled
Kebyart is a Spanish saxophone quartet currently celebrating its tenth anniversary season. To mark the Ravel’s 150th anniversary, Kebyart sets out to explore his unique compositional legacy, despite the composer never having written for saxophone quartet. The album includes Kebyart’s transcriptions of Le Tombeau de Couperin and Pavane pour une infante défunte, alongside arrangements of French Baroque works by Rameau, ...
Adam: Griseldis
Adolphe Adam is famous for the popular ballets Giselle and Le Corsaire, works that were highly influential in the development of 19th-century musical theater, most especially in the evolution of the Romantic ballet. Giselle, still considered the very essence of the Romantic ballet, marked a peak in the composer’s career. The 1848 Revolution, however, coincided with a period of financial ...
Northern Colours
In his new Scandinavia-centric album, Felix Klieser and the German Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Jamie Phillips, present two contemporary concertos for horn and orchestra. Soundscape – A Walk in Colours by Swedish composer Rolf Martinsson (b. 1956) was commissioned for Felix Klieser and was premiered in 2022. Martinsson describes Soundscape as a single-movement concerto divided into five distinct sections, ...
Shostakovich: The Piano Concertos & Solo Works
This album marks the culmination of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s decade-long, Grammy-winning Shostakovich cycle and is released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. It showcases Yuja Wang’s performances with the BSO under the baton of its Music Director Andris Nelsons of Shostakovich’s two contrasting piano concertos – No. 1 in C minor and No. 2 in ...
Fantasies
The youngest cellist ever to win the International Tchaikovsky Competition, Zlatomir Fung presents his solo debut album with pianist Richard Fu featuring six fantasies on themes from opera, including fantasies on melodies from Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, Rossini’s William Tell, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Additionally, the album features Fantasy on Jenůfa which Fung ...
Beloved
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers presents the world premiere recording of Billy Childs’s In the Arms of the Beloved featuring the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon. In the Arms of the Beloved is a requiem for Childs’s mother, Mable Brown Childs. It conveys a profound message of hope, love and resilience that is especially poignant in the wake ...
Errollyn Wallen: Orchestral Works
The BBC Concert Orchestra led by John Andrews present a survey Errollyn Wallen’s orchestral music written between 2000 and 2023, showcasing her distinctive voice across a wide range of moods. Recently appointed Master of the King’s Music by King Charles III, Wallen is a groundbreaking figure in contemporary classical music. The program kicks off with the newest composition: Dances for ...
Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On
After a few albums that stretched the ensemble towards contemporary, crossover, and popular repertoire (including an all-Disney program), The King’s Singers, prolific recording artists at any rate, present a new album that can be characterized as a return to standard repertoire. “’Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On’ is an exploration of European choral music from the early 20th century ...
Brahms & Contemporaries, Vol. 2
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective continues its series with this recording of Johannes Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, alongside Piano Quartet No. 1 of Louise Héritte-Viardot. The Third Piano Quartet gestated for a long time – the first sketches were made in 1855, whilst the work was not completed until 1875. Numerous commentators tie the work to the composer’s infatuation with Clara Schumann, ...
Dance of the Night Sky
The Black Oak Ensemble (violinist Desirée Ruhstrat, violist Aurélien Fort Pederzoli, and cellist David Cunliffe) continues to push the boundaries of the string trio repertoire with their third album on Cedille Records. The idea for the album was born out of a mistaken Google search. During the 2022 World Cup, with Switzerland, Germany, France, and England all in the running—all ...
Honey-coloured Cow: Moosic for Bassoon
From TV theme tunes to a folk-inspired “circle dance on seven notes” by Villa-Lobos, Laurence Perkins, one of Britain’s best-known solo bassoonists, presents a pleasing miscellany of composers and works demonstrating the expressive potential of the bassoon. Perkins gets sterling support from a wealth of fine musicians and ensembles on his eighth album for Hyperion. The program covers a century ...
Jewish Vienna
Soprano Chen Reiss, conductor Daniel Grossmann, and the Jewish Chamber Orchestra Munich explore the music from Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, at the cutting edge of artistic and musical creativity with a sizable and flourishing Jewish artistic community. The works on this album bring together some of the composers of this age, including lesser-known names such as ...
Hommages
The United Strings of Europe and artistic director Julian Azkoul are devoted to developing engaging programs that blend the familiar with the new and encourage the discovery of new repertoire. On Hommages, the ensemble presents a program featuring the world premiere recordings of Dobrinka Tabakova’s Organum Light, inspired by Einstein’s quantum theory of light, Olli Mustonen’s Apotheosis – In memoriam ...
Mieczysław Weinberg: String Quartets, Vol. 5
The Transylvanian-based Arcadia Quartet reaches the fifth volume in its acclaimed series of recordings of the complete string quartets of Mieczysław Weinberg with this release featuring Quartets Nos 3, 9, and 14. As in previous volumes, the varied program features quartets from contrasting periods of Weinberg’s compositional development. Quartet No. 3, composed in 1944, could be considered as the first ...
Aavik Plays Max Bruch & Erkki-Sven Tüür
This new recording from Hans Christian Aavik, winner of the 2022 Carl Nielsen International Competition, brings together two contrasting yet deeply expressive violin concertos: Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, performed with the Odense Symphony and conductor Gemma New. While Bruch’s concerto is a beloved cornerstone of the violin repertoire, ...
Hallelujah Junction
This album of works for two pianos features pianists who are life partners as well as a performing duo, and each also has a thriving solo career. Anna Geniushene won the silver medal at the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, while Lukas Geniušas’s two Rachmaninoff recordings have both won major awards. The program for their first duo album pays ...
Beethoven: Violin Concerto
Nicola Benedetti’s new EP of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was recorded with Aurora Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon, with everyone playing from memory. This is a recording of a piece that emerges out of the urgency of the performances that inspired it, and as Nicola Benedetti says, to “try to approach this music with freshness of heart and mind.” ...
The Last Rose
French gambist Mathilde Vialle leads an ensemble featuring early plucked instrument specialist Thibaut Roussel. It was love at first sight when Vialle and Roussel first encountered the English bass viol and Venetian archlute preserved at the Museum of Music at the Philharmonie de Paris which inspried this program of English music from the second half of the seventeenth century, much ...
Maestra
Following albums that explore the solo piano works of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nora Douglas Holt, and Betty Jackson, and an album of chamber music from the African continent & diaspora with Castle of our Skins, the performer-scholar Dr. Samantha Ege’s new recording features concertos by two trailblazing female composers of the mid-twentieth century. Julia Perry’s Concerto in Two Uninterrupted ...
Liszt: Via Crucis & Solo Piano Works
Leif Ove Andsnes explores the introspective side of Franz Liszt in program that pairs his Via Crucis for choir and piano with a selection of solo works that do not call for the composer’s trademark showmanship or virtuosity. Via Crucis is unlike any other work in the repertoire: a concentrated ritual drama, ranging from liturgical chant to Lisztian chromaticism at ...
