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.
Stay on top of New Releases with WFMT's curated Spotify and Apple Music playlists
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 ...
Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 (re-orchestrated by Mahler) – Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop
Robert Schumann’s Fourth Symphony was initially conceived not long after the success of the First, but the dramatic original single-movement version confused audiences, and substantial revisions resulted in the eloquent masterpiece we hear today. This and the Third Symphony owe a great deal to Beethoven, with the Rhenish sharing much of the joy and effervescence of the Pastoral Symphony. Gustav ...
English Music for Strings – Sinfonia of London, John Wilson
This album from Sinfonia of London and John Wilson features two of the greatest British works for string orchestra: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and Sir Edward Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro. Elgar’s ground-breaking work is inspired by the Baroque concerto grosso, and features a solo string quartet contrasted with the full symphonic string section. These ...
Altissima: Works for High Baroque Trumpet – Josh Cohen, Ensemble Sprezzatura
The development of historically informed trumpet playing has come a long way since the very early days of the movement, from coiled trumpets to the first modern baroque trumpets of Meinl & Lauber. Devoted to a broad cross-section of repertoire from the late seventeenth century through the mid-eighteenth, this recording shows how far the art of playing the baroque trumpet ...
Rachmaninoff: All-Night Vigil – Clarion Choir, Steven Fox
The Clarion Choir and its Artistic Leader Steven Fox make their Pentatone debut with a recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s choral masterpiece, the All-Night Vigil, demonstrating their exceptional proficiency in Russian repertoire. The All-Night Vigil is a nocturnal hymn that gradually moves towards daybreak, symbolizing the Resurrection of Christ. On this recording, many of the movements are preceded by the original ...
Piatti Quartet: Music of Boyle, Vaughan Williams, Moeran, and Ireland
Rubicon has released the first album from the Piatti Quartet on the label – a fascinating recital featuring music of the Irish composer Ina Boyle (including the world premiere commercial release of her beautiful String Quartet in E minor) along with pieces by Ralph Vaughan Williams (a former tutor of Boyle’s), John Ireland, and E.J. Moeran. Prizewinners at the 2015 Wigmore ...
Haydn 2032, Volume 13: Symphonies Nos. 31, 48, 59 – Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini
The Esterházy princes’ love of hunting prompted their “house composer” Joseph Haydn to make extensive use of the horn. At the time, this was still the hand horn, limited to “natural” harmonics since it did not yet have valves. Between 1761 and 1790 there were a total of eighteen horn players in princely service, but no trumpeters. Thus, in his ...
Bob Chilcott: Canticles of Light – NFM Choir
Hailed by The Observer as “a contemporary hero of British choral music,” composer and conductor Bob Chilcott has enjoyed a lifelong connection with singing and choirs. As a composer, he has a large catalog of music that reflects his broad view of musical styles and genres. Canticles of Light features celebrated composers including Cecilia McDowall, Francis Pott, and James MacMillan. ...
Connecting Cultures: Deborah Moriarty, Zhihua Tang
In a project born out of the performers’ desire to connect with other cultures around the world and with one another, Deborah Moriarty and Zhihua Tang have released Connecting Cultures. Both pianists are on faculty at Michigan State University College of Music and each perform around the world. For this album, they share a piano bench, performing works drawn from ...
Elgar: Viola Concerto; Bloch: Suite for Viola and Orchestra – Timothy Ridout, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
Timothy Ridout gives us the opportunity to discover the splendid viola version of Edward Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto – an arrangement approved by the composer, who conducted its premiere in 1930. In addition to this deeply moving work, Ridout gives us a powerful, poetic reading of Ernest Bloch’s all too rarely performed Suite for Viola and Orchestra.
