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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Lodestar Trio: Bach to Folk
Lodestar Trio presents their striking debut album, one that not only exhibits the three performers’ outstanding musicianship but also presents new interpretations of Baroque classics (Bach, Lully, and Couperin), folk tunes, and new compositions. Together, they push the boundaries of their mystical and magical Scandinavian string instruments. With Max Bailie on violin, Olav Luksengård Mjelva on Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, and ...
Vincent Larderet: The Scriabin Mystery
With The Scriabin Mystery, French pianist Vincent Larderet celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Russian composer. Making his Avie label debut, Larderet presents a comprehensive survey of the scope of Alexander Scriabin’s output and the evolution of his style, from his early, post-Romantic works influenced by Chopin and Liszt, through to the modernism of the 20th century in ...
Chineke! Orchestra: Coleridge-Taylor
The Chineke! Orchestra’s new album features music by the celebrated African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with an appearance by award-winning American violinist Elena Urioste, plus a world premiere recording of a work by the composer’s daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor. The album includes the famous Violin Concerto in G minor, which was originally written for Minnie “Maud” Powell, a champion of music by ...
Abel Selaocoe: Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae)
The award-winning South African cellist, composer, and singer Abel Selaocoe blurs Western and non-Western musical traditions with his genre-bending debut album. Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae) is fiercely ambitious in its musical range and features a selection of Selaocoe’s own compositions and improvisations alongside his unique take on solo cello works by the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach and ...
Mikhail Pletnev: Verbier Festival Concertos & Encores
Among the great pianists today, Mikhail Pletnev is regarded as a magician. The latest release on Verbier Festival Gold showcases his powerful artistry in the realms of concertos and encores. This album opens with Franz Joseph Haydn’s D major Concerto, Hob. XVIII (led by Iván Fischer) and Alexander Tsfasman’s Suite No. 1 (led by Kent Nagano). These works are followed ...
Vivaldi: Violin Concertos, Intorno a Pisendel – Julien Chauvin, Le Concert de la Loge
Julien Chauvin and his Concert de la Loge return to Naïve Classics’ Vivaldi Edition with a volume of violin concertos linked to Johann Georg Pisendel, a major musical figure in the court of Dresden in the 18th century. Vivaldi was introduced to Pisendel circa 1716 when the Crown Prince of Saxony traveled to Venice accompanied by musicians from the Dresden ...
Fábio Brum: Alchemy – New Music for Trumpet & Orchestra
Like alchemists of old, attempting to recombine the four elements, here Fábio Brum presents four distinct musical languages in a program forged during lockdown. Gabriele Roberto’s Tokyo Suite charts the astonishment of a traveler dazzled by the vast megapolis, whereas Dimitri Cervo’s Brazilian Four Seasons offers a colorful, energetic panorama of the natural and human worlds. Brum’s very personal musical ...
Bach: Italian Concerto, French Overture – Mahan Esfahani
Mahan Esfahani releases the next installment in his Bach series. With couplings including a compelling rendition of the Capriccio “on the departure of his beloved brother” and performances offering a rare blend of interpretative exuberance and scholarly insight, harpsichord playing really doesn’t get any more exciting than this. Esfahani again highlights the radicalism, virtuosity—and sheer joyousness—of the works recorded here, ...
Christopher Tin: The Lost Birds – Voces8, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
The Lost Birds is Christopher Tin’s soaring elegy for the loss of bird species due to human activity. The album is a memorial for their loss and a celebration of their beauty–as symbols of hope, peace, and renewal. “To put their story into words, I turned to four 19th-century poets–Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sara Teasdale,” ...
Esther Birringer: Debussy
For her second solo recital album for Rubicon, Esther Birringer turns to Claude Debussy with a recital that includes both books of his Images. Composed in 1901-05 (Book 1) and 1907 (Book 2), the composer was very pleased with the music. He wrote about the first set, “Without false pride, I feel that these three pieces hold together well, and ...
Mendelssohn: Fabio Biondi, Europa Galante
Naïve Classics presents the latest from violinist Fabio Biondi and his early music ensemble Europa Galante. This new album of early works by Felix Mendelssohn, all written when the composer was between the ages of eleven and eighteen, showcases the influence his predecessors in the German tradition had on his compositional style. The album also offers an opportunity to discover ...
Barokkbandið Brák: Two Sides
Two Sides is the debut double album from period-instrument ensemble Barokkbandið Brák, one of Iceland’s best-known chamber groups. Founded in 2015 and led by renowned violinist Elfa Rún Kristinsdóttir, the ensemble has made its name not only for excellence in the interpretation of Renaissance and Baroque music but also as a commissioner of new music for period instruments. Reflecting this two-sided ...
Mozart y Mambo: Cuban Dances – Sarah Willis
Following the phenomenal success of the first Mozart y Mambo album, Sarah Willis returns to Cuba not only to record two more Mozart horn concertos but also to create a landmark original work that takes its place in Cuban music history. In Mozart y Mambo: Cuban Dances, Willis has commissioned the very first Cuban horn concerto – calling on six ...
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 – London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle
Sir Simon Rattle loves Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, and on this new recording from LSO Live, he conducts the work in all its splendor. Rattle is aware, too, that Bruckner’s inspiration burned so brightly that he ended up with more ideas than he could actually use. “There is much wonderful music which remains almost entirely unplayed,” he says. On this album, ...
Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 42, 77, 103 – Takács Quartet
Combining an international career with their longstanding appointments as Artists in Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder, the members of the Takács Quartet perform throughout Europe, the United States, Asia, and Australasia, and are Associate Artists at London’s Wigmore Hall. For Hyperion, the ensemble continues its survey of Haydn’s string quartets. Regarding a previous release, BBC Record Review said, ...
Evgeny Kissin: The Salzburg Recital
In August 2021, as the Salzburg Festival made a return to full capacity, Evgeny Kissin drew a sell-out crowd to the city’s Grosses Festspielhaus. He treated his audience to a strikingly original program of works by Alban Berg, Frédéric Chopin, George Gershwin and, to the surprise of some, Tikhon Khrennikov. A generous selection of encores featured one of Kissin’s own ...
Rachel Barton Pine: Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries
Chicago-based violinist Rachel Barton Pine plays American composer Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Jonathon Heyward, on her new Cedille Records album, Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries. The new release marks the 25th anniversary of Pine’s pioneering 1997 Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th and 19th Centuries ...
Sheku Kanneh-Mason: Song
The celebrated cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason has a new solo album which reveals more about the star and what inspires him than ever before. Entitled Song (referring to the unique singing tone of the cello), this is his most personal album yet, presenting a musical portrait of the gifted musician. Stretching from Bach to Bacharach, Song sees Kanneh-Mason present an extraordinary ...
Yuja Wang, Andreas Ottensamer, Gautier Capuçon: Rachmaninoff & Brahms
Pianist Yuja Wang, clarinetist Andreas Ottensamer, and cellist Gautier Capuçon have earned a reputation as a “super-trio,” giving performances worldwide that reveal the instinctive, almost telepathic bond of musical communication that exists between the three players. Their first album for Deutsche Grammophon documents that extraordinary rapport. Capturing the energy and intensity of sessions held at the Konzerthaus Dortmund in 2021, the ...
Vivaldi: Il Mondo al rovescio – Gli Incogniti, Amandine Beyer
A world turned upside down. Vivaldi’s concertos for multiple instruments are true precursors of the symphony in their amplitude and audacity. In these pieces, the “Red Priest,” a creator of boundless imagination, amused himself by devising literally unheard-of combinations of timbres. In the famous concerto Il Mondo al rovescio (The world upside down), he includes flutes, oboes, and harpsichord to double ...
