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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Beethoven: Violin Concerto – Veronika Eberle, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle
For her debut album, violinist Veronika Eberle revisits a work that has endured more than two centuries, and shares a fresh interpretation featuring new cadenzas by composer Jörg Widmann. Not only is Beethoven’s Violin Concerto a particular favorite of Eberle, it has been central to her career to date—most notably alongside Sir Simon Rattle, who has been her long-time supporter ...
Benjamin Grosvenor: Schumann & Brahms
The acclaimed British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor takes Robert Schumann’s haunting Kreisleriana as his starting point in his new album. This eight-movement work portrays the mercurial personality of the fictional Johannes Kreisler, created by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Grosvenor accompanies the work with the Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann by Schumann’s wife Clara. Further kaleidoscopic variety is provided by ...
Hopkinson Smith: Bright and Early
Lutenist Hopkinson Smith’s presents Bright & Early, a new album dedicated to the music of early 16th century composers Joan Ambrosio Dalza and Francesco Spinacino. Smith aims to capture the feeling of the “lone lute player who becomes a teller of tales through his instrument” in these reconstructed works by Dalza and Spinacino, utilizing a 6-course lute strung in the ...
Rachmaninoff: Études-Tableaux, Op. 33 & 39 – Nikolai Lugansky
Following his formidable complete recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, Nikolai Lugansky now immerses us in two more major cycles by the composer, the Études-tableaux. Like Chopin and Liszt, Rachmaninoff here transcends every technical difficulty to make room for emotion alone. At once poet and virtuoso, Nikolai Lugansky is unmatched in his ability to do justice to this prodigious musical kaleidoscope.
Mozart: The Symphonies, The Beginning and the End – Il Pomo d’Oro, Maxim Emelyanychev
Maxim Emelyanychev’s affinity with Mozart is well known, especially when it comes to piano works: in 2018, the conductor and keyboardist treated us to a recording that not only displayed his virtuosity and musicianship, but also revealed his remarkably close understanding of the composer’s music. Today, the symphonies are the focus of his first long-term project with the ensemble Il ...
Saint-Saëns: Violin Sonatas, Berceuse, Fantaisie – Cecilia Zilliacus, Christian Ihle Hadland, Stephen Fitzpatrick
Saint-Saëns’s chamber music broke new ground in France at a time when public taste tended to favor opera. His first sonata for violin and piano, one of the earliest composed in France, is a masterpiece of boundless beauty. Its emotional impact and its highly poetic content are served by the composer’s perfect mastery of formal architecture. The second sonata, composed ...
Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antartica, Symphony No. 9 – BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
With Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica and Symphony No. 9, Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra bring their Vaughan Williams cycle to its magnificent conclusion. These two symphonies date from the composer’s later years, and, while initially misunderstood or underrated, both scores are teeming with creative vigor, startling orchestral color, and absolute mastery of symphonic thought, all qualities which ...
Jean Rondeau: Gradus ad Parnassum
Aspiring to Parnassus, the mythological mountain home of the Muses, Jean Rondeau explores the possibilities of the harpsichord in music composed over more than 400 years – much of it for the piano. He pays tribute to the Austrian composer Johann Joseph Fux, who in 1725 published the original Gradus ad Parnassum, an influential treatise on counterpoint, and to Muzio ...
Vivaldi & Locatelli – Chloe Chua, Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Rising star violinist Chloe Chua makes her recording debut on Pentatone together with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, presenting Vivaldi’s Four Seasons alongside Locatelli’s Harmonic Labyrinth. With the Four Seasons, Chua returns to a piece that’s very dear to her, and with which she won the joint-first prize at the 2018 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists. Despite her young ...
Rafał Blechacz: Chopin
“I feel that I have had some adventures with these pieces before recording them,” says Rafał Blechacz, whose latest album is a tribute to his compatriot Chopin. “I’m freer today regarding the use of tempo rubato, dynamic contrasts and emotional extremes, and maybe I’m braver with certain ideas. I didn’t want to wait any longer before going into the studio.” Blechacz’s devotion to ...
Compositrices: New Light on French Romantic Women Composers
Women composers had great difficulty in making their voices heard and gaining recognition during their lifetimes. Even today, they are all too rarely heard in the concert hall or the opera house. In this eight-CD set featuring several hundred performers, the Palazzetto Bru Zane label offers a response as far as nineteenth-century France is concerned. The selections range over chamber ...
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 ...
