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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Mahler: Symphony No. 5 – Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Payare
The Montreal Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Rafael Payare make their Pentatone debut with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The album is also the first recording under Payare’s tenure and the beginning of a longer recording relationship with the label. For Payare, the Fifth is the last symphony that shows Mahler still looking forward to what the future might bring, unlike ...
Schubert: Piano Sonatas D 537 & 959 – Garrick Ohlsson
Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretative and technical prowess. Although he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire. On this album, Ohlsson offers an inspired pairing of ...
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 – Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst
Written during the final months of World War II, Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 was described by the composer as “a symphony of the greatness of the human spirit, a song of praise of free and happy mankind.” The 1945 premiere, a runaway success, marked the highpoint of Prokofiev’s career in the Soviet Union. “Yet, there is a subtext,” says ...
Respighi: The Birds, Ancient Airs and Dances – Royal Liège Philharmonic Orchestra, John Neschling
The Royal Liège Philharmonic Orchestra and John Neschling bring us the sixth and last installment in a series devoted to the orchestral music of Ottorino Respighi. The immense popularity of his Roman Trilogy has had the effect of obscuring many parts of Respighi’s work, including arrangements of pieces from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. These arrangements, a genuine declaration of ...
Byron Quartet, Matteo Mela: Souvenir d’Espagne
Joaquin Turina and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco both carry Spain within them – the former because he was born there, the latter through his Spanish ancestors, exiled long before him. The Byron Quartet with guitarist Matteo Mela bring together four of their works filled with Hispanic musical reminiscences. Just like the country that inspired them, each of these pieces stands at the ...
Uncovered, Volume 3: George Walker, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still – Catalyst Quartet
Over the course of time there have been many overlooked artists in classical music, because of their race and/or gender. It is important to acknowledge that we have not yet heard the whole story due to this sidelining of voices. “Uncovered” is a multi-volume anthology highlighting string quartet works by historically important Black composers, which aims to bring greater awareness ...
Nuits Parisiennes – Manon Galy, Jorge González Buajasán
At the beginning of the twentieth century, all roads led to Paris. The Exposition Universelle drew great crowds, Hemingway and Kandinsky settled there, Proust wrote À la Recherche… and Cocteau La Machine infernale, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes revolutionized dance, and Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky caused scandal. Recording together as a duo for the first time, violinist Manon Galy and pianist Jorge ...
Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 3 & 4 – Boris Giltburg, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko
This album is the culmination of Boris Giltburg’s Beethoven piano concertos cycle. For 19th-century audiences, Concerto No. 3 was the most loved of all his piano concertos, a work in which the balancing of high drama, tenderness, lyricism, and humor is most pronounced. Piano Concerto No. 4 is the most introspective and poetic of the concertos. The simplicity of its ...
Verdi Choruses – La Scala Chorus & Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
As part of Riccardo Chailly’s seventieth birthday celebrations in February 2023, Decca offers a new album of Verdi choruses conducted by Chailly with the orchestral and choral forces of La Scala, where he is Music Director. The repertoire spans much of Verdi’s output, and includes choruses both familiar and less well-known. The recording draws on the deep connection which the ...
Breaking Barriers – Ontario Pops Orchestra, Carlos Bastidas
Inspired by watching broadcasts of the Boston Pops Orchestra as a youngster in his native Colombia, Carlos Bastidas founded the Ontario Pops Orchestra in 2014 to foster musicianship in a positive, inclusive, and supportive environment. One of the most diverse professional orchestras in Canada, the Toronto-based orchestra performs classical and popular music and highlights the work of women and BIPOC ...
Romeo and Juliet: Tchaikovsky on the Piano – Yevgeny Sudbin
Yevgeny Sudbin remembers falling in love with Tchaikovsky’s music when he was introduced to classical music. On this album, the pianist presents a collection of piano pieces and arrangements for piano, solo and four hands, of orchestral works by the great Russian composer, preceding it with a curtain raiser much-loved by Tchaikovsky himself: Mikhail Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila. ...
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber: Mystery (Rosary) Sonatas – Amandine Beyer, Gli Incogniti
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Mystery (or Rosary) Sonatas rank, along with Bach’s unaccompanied violin music, among the most challenging works in the Baroque violin repertoire. Biber’s experimentation with the instrument is unique, even to this day. Each of the fifteen sonatas depicts one of the mysteries of the rosary and is paired in the manuscript with an anonymous engraving illustrating ...
Music of George Walker & William Dawson – Seattle Symphony, Roderick Cox, Asher Fisch, Nicole Cabell
The works of George Walker and William Levi Dawson are a microcosm of Black classical composers’ stylistic diversity. Each draws upon African American music idioms for different settings, characters, and functions. And yet, the works connect through the importance of programmatic and emotive narratives within the Black classical practice. Whether quoting or arranging spirituals, or using blues notes or serialism, ...
Clara & Robert Schumann: Piano Concertos – Beatrice Rana, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Beatrice Rana, partnered by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, performs the piano concertos of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck-Schumann. Rana complements them with Liszt’s transcription for solo piano of Robert’s song Widmung, an exuberant dedication of love composed in the year of Robert and Clara’s marriage. Clara Wieck-Schumann, whose career as a major pianist lasted for ...
Vaughan Williams & Grieg: Violin Sonatas – Charlie Siem, Itamar Golan
Charlie Siem returns with a new recording of sonatas, accompanied by his regular recital partner Itamar Golan – featuring Vaughan Williams’ Violin Sonata in A Minor and Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major. Siem is one of today’s foremost young violinists, with such a wide-ranging diversity of cross-cultural appeal as to have played a large part in defining ...
Seong-Jin Cho: The Handel Project
Handel’s keyboard suites have remained strangers to most concert pianists. Seong-Jin Cho hopes that his latest album will shed new light on some of the most heartfelt of all Baroque music. The Handel Project contains three of the South Korean pianist’s favorite suites from Handel’s first collection of Suites de pièces pour le clavecin. These are coupled with Brahms’s virtuosic Variations ...
Les Nuits de Paris: Dance Music from Folies Bergère to Opéra – Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth
The dance permeated every layer of Romantic society. From popular dance halls to courtly salons, people showed their public face, enjoyed themselves, and met one another in waltz time or to the rhythms of the quadrille or the polka. At the same time, ballet gained unprecedented fame on the stage of the Paris Opéra. The music that accompanied this frantic ...
Justin Holland: Guitar Works & Arrangements – Christopher Mallett
Justin Holland was an important African American figure in the national anti-slavery movement as well as being a significant figure in guitar composition and methodology. As a composer, he synthesized European models and embraced popular, church, and parlor songs, generating a rich variety of works. A master of virtuosic variations, his arrangements are witty, elegant, and colorful, culminating in Carnival ...
Schubert: Piano Trios Nos. 1 & 2, Arpeggione Sonata – Christian Tetzlaff, Tanya Tetzlaff, Lars Vogt
This new double-album by pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff includes some of Franz Schubert’s greatest works of chamber music, including his Piano Trios and the Arpeggione Sonata in breath-taking interpretations. Pianist Lars Vogt tragically passed away on September 5, 2022 due to a serious illness before this album was released. The recording stands as a ...
Eldbjørg Hemsing: Arctic
Violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing and Sony Classical present a unique concept album. “Arctic” is a musical journey through a stunningly beautiful region and a celebration of a fragile and largely unexplored ecosystem threatened by climate change. “The Arctic is often misrepresented as stark and uninhabitable wasteland,” Hemsing explains. “Yet it’s a region of matchless beauty abounding in life, one that magically ...
