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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Vivaldi in Prague
The Harmonious Society of Tickle-Fiddle Gentleman led by Robert Rawson explores Antonio Vivaldi’s influence on a generation of Czech composers. Best remembered today for The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s dedication of the famous concertos to Count Wenzel von Morzin of Prague implies the works may first have become known there. In 1718 Morzin brought his “virtuosissima” orchestra – to quote Vivaldi ...
Caribbean Violin Concertos
The Chevalier de Saint-George(s) is an exceptional figure. Born in Guadeloupe in the eighteenth century to an aristocrat and an enslaved woman, he received the education of a court gentleman in Paris and went on to become a violinist, fencer, Freemason, participant in the Revolution, conductor, and composer. It is naturally to the violin that he dedicated his finest works. ...
Nico Muhly: With Eys Lift Up
The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford led by Mark Williams (Music Director and organist) present 13 premiere recordings of works by Nico Muhly written expressly for — and the majority commissioned by — the Choir. Comprising settings of the mass and canticles alongside anthems for Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascensiontide, Trinity Sunday, and Remembrance, the collection sets a number of ...
Inferno
The latest release from Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov combines the fire and virtuosity suggested by the album’s title (and cover), tempered with the musical depth and poetic communication for which he is equally acclaimed. Inferno begins with music by Carl Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven and a teacher to Liszt best known for his technical exercises from The School of ...
Marianna Martines: The Complete Keyboard Works
Pianist Idith Meshulam Korman and the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, led by Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, present the first complete modern recording of the surviving keyboard music of Marianna Martines (1744–1812): a composer, keyboard virtuoso, and cultural force in eighteenth-century Viennese musical life. Admired in her lifetime for her brilliance as both performer and composer, Martines occupied a central position within the city’s ...
Shostakovich Symphony No. 10
Recorded in front of a live audience at the Harris Theater, this performance serves as a souvenir from Giancarlo Guerrero’s first season as Grant Park Music Festival Artistic Director and Prinicipal Conductor. “Early in his tenure, Guerrero has already developed sufficient rapport with his players that they could mutually revel in Shostakovich’s acrobatic antics,” noted Tim Sawyier for Chicago Classical ...
Haydn2032, Vol. 19: Trauer
This 19th volume of Haydn’s complete symphonies coincides with the 40th anniversary of Il Giardino Armonico – the ensemble created and conducted by Giovanni Antonini, artistic director of the Haydn 2032 series. The Symphony No. 44 in E minor, featured in this volume, was the first work by Haydn performed by the ensemble and Antonini. The title of this symphony, ...
Invictus
Inspired by William Ernest Henley’s (1849–1903) iconic poem of the same name, Stacy Garrop’s new piano concerto INVICTUS was commissioned by and written for Chicago native and multi-Grammy-nominated pianist Marta Aznavoorian, who performs it with the Chicago Philharmonic under Artistic Director Scott Speck. Despite a difficult life beleaguered with health issues, William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus, Latin for “unconquered,” is ...
Brahms & Contemporaries, Vol. 3
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective concludes their series of pairing Brahms’s three piano quartets with lesser known contemporaries. The final installment features the Quartet No. 1 paired with Dora Pejačević’s Piano Quartet in D Minor, Op. 25 and her Impromptu for Piano Quartet, Op. 9b. “We can imagine some eyebrows being raised at the description of Dora Pejačević as a contemporary of ...
Spiritillo Mediterraneo
Spanish violinist Cristina Prats Costa presents her debut solo debut album, a vibrant portrait of the sound world of 17th and early 18th century music shaped by the cultures of the Mediterranean. Inspired by Andrea Falconieri’s Il Spiritillo Brando, the album takes the spiritillo – a mischievous, animating sprite – as a metaphor for the Baroque imagination: a realm of ...
Kip Winger: Symphony of the Returning Light
Kip Winger is a genre-bridging composer with a long and successful career in rock music affiliated with luminaries of the genre such as Alice Cooper, Alan Parsons, Roger Daltrey and Bob Dylan. Over the past two decades, however, Winger has been establishing himself as a composer of orchestral classical music. His celebrated ballet score, Conversations with Nijinsky, led conductor Giancarlo ...
Johanna Senfter: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 9
German composer Johanna Senfter (1879–1961) was a student of Max Reger, who recognized her musical talent and encouraged her to pursue advanced studies in his composition class in Leipzig, which she completed with distinction in 1909. In 1910, she was awarded the Arthur Nikisch Prize for best student composition of the year. Born into a well-to-do industrial family, she was ...
Encounter
Clarinetist Chen Halevi and the Arethusa Quartet bring together two towering works of contemporary chamber music from profoundly different traditions: Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind and Pēteris Vasks’ String Quartet No. 6. Golijov’s ecstatic, ritual-like score finds the composer returning to Jewish mysticism, while Vasks’ Sixth Quartet references Baltic spirituality, tracing a life’s arc from ...
Mel Bonis: Orchestral Works
Mel Bonis (1858-1937) was a great musical talent and a sensitive soul, the child of a socially aspiring family who forbid their daughter to marry the love of her life. Forced into a utilitarian marriage with a respectable husband, she later had an affair with her first sweetheart after all — the stuff of a sentimental novel. Yet she was ...
Bomba Flamenca
In 1558, two years after the last Carolingian emperor Charles V had stepped down from power, he realized his death was near and decided to have a rehearsal for his own funeral. This scene provides the starting point for Simon-Pierre Bestion’s imaginative assemblage of chants and hymns demonstrating Arabic influence in Spain, Requiem mass movements, and much more with his ...
Piano Recital: Scriabin; Rachmaninoff
Pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko made history as the first Canadian to win the Grand Prize at the Concours musical international de Montréal in 2024, the same year he was named Gold Medalist at the 2024 Leeds International Piano Competition. His second solo album for Naxos is a souvenir of his recital from the 20th Paloma O’Shea Santander International Piano Competition (2022), ...
Senza Parole
Renowned horn player Felix Klieser’s eighth solo album explores Italian opera arias, film music, and song. Kleiser is joined by the Italian orchestra I Solisti di Pavia, recorded in the famous Teatro Fraschini at Pavia. The program features some of the most beloved opera arias by Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, as well as Italian songs like “O Sole Mio” and Nino ...
Beethoven/5 Vol. 5
Jonathan Biss concludes his Beethoven/5 commissioning project bringing to a close one of the most ambitious and innovative Beethoven release series of the 21st century. Over the course of five years, Biss selected a composer to write a piano concerto in response to one of Beethoven’s. The final installment of the project, featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malin ...
Alto Appassionato
Violist Timothy Ridout and pianist Jonathan Ware present works by friends and colleagues working side by side in the musical melting pot of fin de siècle Paris. The centerpiece of the album is César Franck’s Violin Sonata of 1886 performed in Paul-Louis Neuberth’s 1919 arrangement for viola. The program also features Léon Honnoré’s Morceau de concert, premiered in 1904 by viola ...
Albares – Latin American Trumpet Concertos
Venezuelan trumpet virtuoso and composer Pacho Flores presents world premiere recordings of Latin American trumpet concertos with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under their chief conductor Domingo Hindoyan. Flores and Hindoyan’s tangible musical chemistry stems from a friendship going back to their time in the Simon Bolivar Orchestra. The title work is Flores’s own vibrant and rhythmic flugelhorn concerto which ...
