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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Live at the Met
Decca Classics presents a recital by soprano Lise Davidsen and pianist James Baillieu recorded at the Metropolitan Opera in September 2023. Their program reflects the full spectrum of Davidsen’s range, moving effortlessly between opera, song and musical theatre. Davidsen demonstrates her mastery of the music of Richard Strauss with four songs: “Allerseelen,” “Befreit,” “Zueignung,” and “Morgen.” Opera highlights include “Dich, ...
Echoes of Vienna
Vienna was in the grip of serious political unrest that forced many Jewish artists into exile when Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed his Second String Quartet in 1933, first performed the following year in the Austrian capital. In it he celebrated, before it faded away, the vitality of a musical school of which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been one of the ...
Emporium – Music of Aldo López-Gavilán
Cuban pianist-composer Aldo López-Gavilan presents world-premiere recordings of three of his own orchestral and solo works highlighting the composer’s distinctive musical voice—one that seamlessly blends classical virtuosity, improvisational freedom, jazz inflections, and Afro-Cuban rhythmic vitality. The title work is a three-movement piano concerto originally conceived during an improvisation session as a musical gift for the composer’s daughters. The album also ...
Rhapsody in Black
Vyacheslav Gryaznov’s Rhapsody in Black is a stunning and original work that blends classical and jazz influences, showcasing Gryanznov’s extraordinary skill as both a pianist and a composer. Based on themes from the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Rhapsody in Black picks up the story where the opera leaves off: Bess in New York, Porgy following in her footsteps. Rhapsody in Black ...
Opera Suites for Nonet – Act III
Founded in 2016, ensemble minui comprises five string and our wind players) active in the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra, the Slovenian National- and the Vienna State Opera orchestras who perform reduced versions of works from the symphonic and operatic repertoire. While simple reductions of large orchestral works were initially on the program, opera music gradually became the great passion of ensemble ...
Rising
The all-women a capella ensemble Lyyra (the only one of its kind based in the United States) presents their debut album with a genre-defying program that showcases the multifaceted beauty of upper voices. Created by VOCES 8, Lyyra’s members are Anna Crumley, MaryRuth Miller, Elizabeth Tait, Ingrid Johnson, Aryssa Leigh Burrs and Cecille Elliott, representing a wide range of specialisms ...
Beyond Vivaldi: Lute Concertos
Composed during Antonio Vivaldi’s stay in Prague in 1729–30, the Concerto for Lute RV 93 is the most celebrated example of a repertoire almost totally neglected today, but once extremely popular in the German-speaking world, particularly in the Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia. In her new album. lutenist Evangelina Mascardi illuminates a fundamental chapter in the history of the ...
Puccini: Heroines
A souvenir the all-Puccini program presented by Lyric Opera of Chicago in February 2025 featuring Sondra Radvanovsky with the Lyric Opera Orchestra conducted by Enrique Mazzola, recorded live. In a feat only imaginable for a soprano assoluta, the extraordinary Berwyn, Illinois-native performed one aria from every Puccini opera bringing vivid individuality to each heroine, from the tender lyricism of “Sì. ...
Leokadiya Kashperova: Piano Concerto · Symphony
Leokadiya Kashperova (1872–1940) was Igor Stravinsky’s piano teacher, having herself been a student of Anton Rubinstein. To this day, however, her compositions remain in the shadow of the male Russian masters, a fate shared by many other women of this era. Although her output is nowhere near as comprehensive as that of her contemporaries, what she did produce demonstrates incredible ...
Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works
Pianist Alice Sara Ott presents world premiere recordings of piano transcriptions of music by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The program includes some of the composer’s most iconic works from different films as well as from his studio albums Orphée and Englabörn. “What’s so incredible about Jóhannsson’s music,” writes Ott, “is how his compositions, originally written for larger ensembles ...
Schumann: Violin Concerto & Works for Violin and Piano by Clara and Robert Schumann
Violinist Midori — artistic director of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute program for piano and strings — presents an album of works by Robert and Clara Schumann with pianist Özgür Aydin and the Festival Strings Lucerne under the direction of Daniel Dodds. Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor was composed in 1853 but withheld from publication for more than ...
JS Bach: Johannes-Passion
Raphaël Pichon and his ensemble Pygmalion have emerged as superlative interpreters of Bach. They continue their exploration of the composer’s major works with this new recording of the St. John Passion. With their exemplary articulation and dynamic flexibility, the Pygmalion chorus is at the center of this striking drama. Raphaël Pichon’s precise direction restores the Passion’s original dramatic arc, instilling ...
Constellations
Winner of the 2019 St Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Music Competition, the Brompton Quartet was formed in 2018 at the Royal College of Music and has performed extensively around the UK, making debuts at major London concert venues including the Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, and the Southbank Centre. The string quartet’s debut album traces a musical journey through almost a millennium of ...
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Forward Into Light
Sarah Kirkland Snider’s latest album features four of the composer’s orchestral works performed by Metropolis Ensemble led by artistic director Andrew Cyr. The title work, Forward Into Light, is a commission for the New York Philharmonic inspired by the American women’s suffrage movement. The album includes a reimagining of the string quartet Snider wrote for the Emerson String Quartet as ...
Puccini: Orchestral Music
Written in 1892, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut catapulted him to international fame, but his early works — pre-Manon Lescaut — offer a fascinating insight into his development as a composer. John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London lead a journey through this development that includes student compositions and orchestral extracts from Puccini’s earliest operas. The Preludio sinfonico (loosely based on Wagner’s ...
Arcadian Dreams
Soprano Hannah De Priest, who is on an upward trajectory as a leading interpreter of 17th and 18th century repertoire, caps a breakout season (including performances with Haymarket Opera and Bella Voce, leading roles with Boston Early Music Festival, and debuts with Music of the Baroque and Bach in the City) with her debut solo album. Referencing both Greek mythology ...
Beethoven: The Last Three Sonatas
Regarded as one of the finest interpreters of classical and romantic repertoire, Dame Imogen Cooper presents Beethoven’s Sonatas No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110, and No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. “It has taken many years for me to perceive the last three sonatas by Beethoven as the evolving journey I ...
Nico Muhly: No Resting Place
Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars present world premiere recordings of works written for them by Nico Muhly. Phillips says that Muhly “immediately understood our particular sound and a succession of masterpieces followed, each as powerful as the last.” The title work is a setting of Jeremiah’s Lamentations, interspersed with contemporary interviews with people from the Windrush generation of Caribbean ...
Origines
Established in 2016, Trio Sypniewski comprises violinist Magdalena, violist Anna, and cellist Caroline Sypniewski. For their debut album, the three sisters return both to the birth of the string trio and to the origins of their own ensemble. The program includes Purcell’s fantasias for viols – intimate pieces enriched by the musicians’ historically informed performance practice – alongside trios by ...
Walton: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Orb and Sceptre
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra presents its first recording led by Kazuki Yamada who took the helm as music director in 2023, continuing the work of such eminent predecessors as Sir Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Andris Nelsons, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. The rogram, recorded live at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, showcases three works by William Walton: the Coronation March Orb and ...
