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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Bach: The 6 Partitas
Francesco Tristano is a Luxembourgish classical and experimental pianist and composer who also plays the clarinet. In his new album, Tristano interprets some of JS Bach’s most challenging pieces written for keyboard. The album is branded with Tristano’s own imprint intothefuture, making its debut on the Naïve label. Tristano has previously released three other albums dedicated to the music of ...
Hollywood
German pianist Sebastian Knauer explains the inspiration behind his new album with the Berlin German Symphony Orchestra: “My encounter with the great American film composer and conductor David Newman led me to dedicate an entire album to American film music from its beginnings to the present day.” David Newman, who made the orchestral arrangements for several of the album’s tracks, ...
Cello Concertos, Sonatas & Quintets – Music of the Angels
The acclaimed British cellist Steven Isserlis presents an imaginative selection of Luigi Boccherini’s cello concertos and cello-centric chamber music. The album shines a light on Boccherini’s graceful melodies and translucent scoring which makes the cello sound like a sister to the violins rather than their stern father.
MacDowell: Orchestral Works Vol. 1
This first release in a new series dedicated to the orchestral works of the American composer Edward MacDowell centers the First Piano Concerto, played by Xiayin Wang with the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Wilson. The various romantic influences that shaped the style of the First Concerto include the music of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and Grieg, while the technical demands ...
Christmas
Carlos Simon — Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the inaugural Boston Symphony Orchestra Composer Chair, and a member of The Blacknificent 7 — has already had his music performed by the world’s leading ensembles including the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra for the Last Night of the Proms, the Cincinnati ...
Crimson Roses
The three world premiere choral recordings on this album represent the commitment of Musica Viva NY’s artistic director, Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, to perform new works by living composers. Joseph Turrin’s Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair is the album’s centerpiece, boasting a movement for soloist and orchestra sung by the legendary American mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, who has announced this performance ...
Children’s Stories
Led by Stilian Kirov, the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra makes its debut on Cedille Records with the world premiere recordings of Michael Abels’s Frederick’s Fables and Augusta Read Thomas’s Gwendolyn Brooks Settings. These works were adapted from short stories by celebrated children’s author and illustrator Leo Lionni and the poetry of former U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. Frederick’s Fables, which features ...
American Sketches
Violinist Kristin Lee’s debut solo album offers a distinct and recognizable sound of American music and its rich history, encapsulating both Lee’s journey as an American, as well as the journeys of the composers in the United States. A native of Seoul, Korea, Lee was compelled to select repertoire that expresses her pride in the country she now calls her ...
saman
Joseph Ehrenpreis is a multi-instrumental guitar performer. His specialization includes the 8-string “Brahms Guitar,” an instrument invented by David Rubio and Paul Galbraith in 1994 that uses an endpin and a resonance box, boasting an extended upper and lower range. Ehrenpreis, a native of Skokie, currently a student at Yale University, describes it as “the love child of my two ...
The Joyful Mysteries Choral Symphony and Other Works
American composer Daniel Knaggs’s The Joyful Mysteries is a choral symphony of five movements which correspond to the “Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary” in Catholicism: The angel’s Annunciation to Mary, her Visitation of Elizabeth, the Nativity of Christ, his Presentation in the temple, and his Finding in the temple as a young boy. The libretto is drawn from Biblical texts ...
Principal
Black Moon Trio (violinist Khelsey Zarraga, hornist Parker Nelson, and pianist Jeremy Vigil) is an ensemble committed to collaboratively affecting positive change in communities through chamber music. Founded in 2022, the trio champions underrepresented voices in their programming and commissions and aims to prove classical music is for everyone by engaging diverse audiences, youth, and artists of every type. Black ...
American Opus (Americascapes 2)
Following the acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Americascapes, the Basque National Orchestra and its music director Robert Treviño present a second album dedicated to American repertoire. American Opus features three 20th century compositions. George Walker’s first orchestral work, the folk and gospel-tinged Address for Orchestra (1959), is one that the composer hoped Robert Treviño would one day record. George Crumb’s enigmatic A Haunted ...
Resonance
The new album from British virtuoso trumpeter Matilda Lloyd with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lee Reynolds explores the many meanings of the word “resonance.” The two featured concertos echo music of the past, with Mieczysław Weinberg’s containing fanfares harking back to the trumpet’s military beginnings, as well as snippets of music by other composers, including Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, ...
Winter Gardens
The latest album from the prolific 25-year-old trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary features a collection of winter-themed popular songs by Richard Rodgers, Charlie Chaplin, and Hugh Martin alongside short movements from the classical repertoire by Dvořák, Rossini, Falla, Kreisler, Bach, and Vivaldi. Winter Gardens, which features the Paris Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sascha Goetzel, also features a work new to the ...
Haydn 2032, Vol. 16: The Surprise
In the lead-up to the 300th anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s birth in 2032, the Joseph Haydn Foundation in Basel is producing the performance and recording of all 107 of the composer’s symphonies by Il Giardino Armonico and Basel Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, one of the most highly-respected specialists in baroque, early classical and classical music, with ...
Baroque Concertos
Trevor Pinnock, a pioneer in the historically informed performance practice, has convened a bespoke ensemble, dubbed Pinnock’s Players, to partner with star trumpeter Alison Balsom on her new album of Baroque concertos. All six of the concertos recorded here – by Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, Albinoni and Marcello – are transcriptions of virtuoso works for violin or oboe, performed by Balsom ...
Brahms and Schubert
French pianist Alexandre Kantorow, winner of the Gold Medal at the 2019 Tchaikovsky competition, presents his fourth solo album for BIS, and his ninth album overall. The centerpiece work is Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, considered to be the most virtuosic composition in his entire output. Liszt transcriptions of five Schubert lieder include the song quoted in the Wanderer Fantasy, “Der Wanderer,” ...
Who’s Afraid Of…?
The title of the Boulanger Trio’s latest album alludes to Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own” discussing the barriers faced by female creative artists. The Boulanger Trio (Karla Haltenwanger, piano; Birgit Erz, violin; Ilona Kindt, cello) pay tribute to centuries of women composers who struggled with, and one way or another triumphed over, those barriers. Included ...
Brahms Cello Sonatas
Longtime collaborators cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Inon Barnatan present Brahms’s two Cello Sonatas, alongside their arrangement of his Violin Sonata in G Major on the cello. This Brahms portrait follows the duo’s recent acclaimed double album dedicated to Beethoven’s complete Cello Sonatas. While Beethoven’s sonatas reveal the gradual ascendancy of the cello as the proper solo instrument over the ...
Brass at Christmas
A selection of John Rutter’s most famous Christmas carols in beautiful new arrangements for brass, performed by the Black Dyke Band. Rutter’s sense of melody combined with a rich harmonic palette makes his music instantly accessible to performers and audiences alike, making him one of the most acclaimed and successful composers of carols alive today. The Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus, led ...
