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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Gipps: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3
For their third installment of orchestral works by Ruth Gipps, Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic center the 20th century composer’s Symphony No. 1 and Horn Concerto with soloist Martin Owen. Dated September 1942, the First Symphony is a direct reflection of the horrors of war. The work demonstrates Gipps’s personal voice and features some wonderful writing for winds. Gipps ...
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5; Leonore Overture No. 3
A reissue of a live recording made at an acclaimed concert in Munich on October 17, 1976, featuring the Fifth Symphony and Leonore Overture No. 3, new to the WFMT library. Following this all-Beethoven program with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein returned to Munich to conduct regularly, beginning an annual series with the orchestra in 1983. Joachim Kaiser, ...
Alone Together
Recent guests in the WFMT studios, Cantus presents a collection of songs that what it means to connect in the modern world on their fourth release on Signum Classics. The program reflects upon the tension between technology and human longing for genuine in-person interaction. Citing the documentary Social Dilemma as an inspiration, ensemble bass Chris Foss says “the digital revolution ...
Clara Schumann: Piano Music, Vol. 1
Pianist Jean-Pierre Armengaud is considered a leading interpreter of French music and a specialist in Impressionist and Expressionist repertoire. He has been director for musical programming at Radio France and is associate professor at the Paris-Sorbonne University. Following his acclaimed recordings of the complete piano works of Debussy, Armengaud embarks on a project to record all of Clara Schumann’s solo ...
Vivaldi: Sacro Furore – Stabat Mater, Nisi Dominus, Concerti
A former member of Le Jardin des Voix, the apprenticeship program for William Christie‘s seminal ensemble Les Arts Florissants, Carlo Vistoli has risen to the top of the field of baroque specialists. Chicago audiences were introduced to the Italian countertenor in 2017 when he sang the role of Ottone in The Coronation of Poppea with the Monteverdi 450 tour in ...
The Great Glad Tidings Tell
This new album that showcases the singers of Trinity Church Boston, the historic 1,500-seat Episcopal Church in Boston’s Back Bay. The title comes from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, the famous text penned by Phillips Brooks, the storied nineteenth century rector of Trinity Church – yet the release has a contemporary feel that showcases the choir’s commitment to inclusivity, community, ...
Christopher Tyler Nickel: Concerto For Piccolo, Concerto For Four Wagner Tubas
Celebrated for his scores for film and television, Canadian composer Christopher Tyler Nickel is also known for writing concertos for unusual instruments. Nickel’s newest release features his Concerto for Piccolo, dedicated to and premiered by Sarah Jackson, principal piccolo player of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The piccolo concerto is paired with the Concerto for four Wagner Tubas, the hybrid tuba-French ...
The Well-Tempered Clavier
The music of Bach is a major cornerstone for Michael Houstoun, who has recorded the 96 pieces that comprise Bach’s Preludes and Fugues Books 1 & 2 on a four-CD set. As Houstoun says, “For a pianist like myself, someone for whom music virtually begins with Johann Sebastian Bach, he provides a series of bottom lines of incalculable value everywhere ...
Bill & Friends
Founder and artistic director of the pioneering Les Arts Florissants, American conductor William Christie is an icon of historically informed performance practice, a flamboyantly skilled harpsichordist, and one the critical figures in reviving 17th and 18th century French repertoire. This album gathers a host of young artists who are dear to him (gambist Myriam Rignol, harpsichordist Justin Taylor, lutenist Thomas ...
Shor: Composer’s Notebook, Vol. 1
Alexey Shor is an American composer who was born and raised in Ukraine. His seven-movement neoclassical Travel Notebook, Suite for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 offers personal impressions of places he has visited, with highly accessible music that is harmonically traditional and melodic. Shor’s Violin Concerto No. 4, composed during the Covid pandemic, is a restless, passionate, and romantic work, ...
Folies Parisiennes
From the Paris Exhibition to the 1950s, trumpets and cornet à pistons made in France inspired many compositions for the instruments resulting in an abundance of solo repertory. Music flourished everywhere in Paris during the period covered by this new album. Using four historical instruments from the collection of the Musée de la musique (such as a valve cornet ca. ...
Yves Castagnet: Magnificat
In early December 2024, five-and-a-half years after the devastating fire of 2019, the great Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris reopened to the public. This recording of a new choral setting of the Magnificat by the organist-composer Yves Castagnet celebrates the cathedral’s “rebirth.” Since 1988, Castagnet has held the post of choir organist at Notre-Dame. His role also encompasses interpretative coaching ...
Puccini
Rising star British-Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Edward Garner mark the Puccini anniversary year with a new EP of five arias. Mario Cavaradossi in Tosca is the Puccini role that marked the barnstorming tenor’s introduction to American audiences — the vehicle for his US debut at Santa Fe Opera in 2023, and his ...
Schütz: Weihnachtshistorie
Led by bass and recorder player Lionel Meunier, Vox Luminis is an early music ensemble based in Belgium which specializes in English, Italian, and especially German 17th- and 18th- century repertoire. The ensemble is comprised of some of the most sought-after European vocal soloists, and is supplemented, depending on the repertoire, with an extensive continuo, solo instruments, or a complete ...
Ehnes & Armstrong play Brahms & Schumann
Celebrated violinist James Ehnes picks up the viola for his first recording of the Op. 120 sonatas of Brahms in the composer’s arrangement for viola and piano. Originally written for clarinet, Brahms made subtle changes for the viola versions, enriching the meagre viola sonata repertoire with these two late masterpieces. Composed in just a few days in 1851, Robert Schumann’s ...
Adèle Hugo: Mélodies sur des poèmes de Victor Hugo
This album pays homage to the composer Adèle Hugo (1830-1915), the fifth child of the great poet Victor Hugo. Suffering from lifelong psychological instability, she spent half of her tragic life in mental institutions, from the age of 42 until her death at 85. She became passionately fond of music from an early age, studying the piano and then composition. ...
In Dulci Jubilo
The Windsbacher Boys’ Choir is considered one of the best ensembles of its kind. Since its founding in 1946, it has stood for the synthesis of musicality, versatility, precision and purity of sound. Ludwig Böhme has been the new artistic director of the Windsbacher since 2022. The new Christmas album, for which they joined forces with the Berlin-based period instrument ...
The Christmas Album
Lieder specialist Benjamin Appl celebrates Christmas with sacred arias by Bach and Mendelssohn, carols from Germany, Austria, America, Britain, Sweden and France. Appl is accompanied by instrumentalists (including his own mother on guitar), the Munich Radio Orchestra, and Germany’s most famous children’s choir, Regensburger Domspatzen, of which he was a member in his youth. “I returned to my hometown to ...
A Lullaby Carol: Christmas At Christ Church
Comprised of a treble line of boy choristers and an ATB line of men and women, the Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford holds a distinctive place within the great English choral tradition. Unlike all other collegiate and cathedral choirs, it serves both an Oxford college and a diocese. The choir is revered for the vibrancy of its sound and ...
Fasch: Orchestral Works Vol. 4
This volume of modern premieres of works by Johann Friedrich Fasch was recorded during a program that opened the 2023 International Fasch Festival in Zerbst, the city in which the composer was Capellmeister to the princely court. Fasch, a German violinist and composer, falls in the transitional period between the High Baroque and Classical eras. Tempesta di Mare has been ...
