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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Serenata: Brazilian Music for Chamber Orchestra – English Chamber Orchestra
Brazilian composers in the 19th century often sought state scholarships to enable them to study in Europe where they were influenced by the German, Italian, and French compositional schools. They also became involved in the vogue for writing suites based on ancient dances, such as Alberto Nepomuceno’s delightful Ancient Suite, premiered at Edvard Grieg’s home, or Francisco Braga’s Madrigal-Pavana which ...
Mozart: Complete Piano Sonatas, Volumes 2 & 3 – Orli Shaham
The internationally-renowned concert pianist Orli Shaham is deep into a multi-year endeavor of recording all of Mozart’s piano sonatas. In this two-CD set, she performs the ever-popular Sonata K. 331, including the Rondo Alla Turca; one of the most technically demanding piano works by Mozart – the Sonata in D major, K. 576; and the Sonata in A minor, K. ...
Summer Night Concert 2022 – Vienna Philharmonic, Andris Nelsons
The Summer Night Concert is an annual open-air event which has been held since 2008. The park of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna is the magical setting for the concert. For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, the concert was able to take place again with a full audience. The Vienna Philharmonic devoted this year’s program to the theme of ...
Alison Balsom: Quiet City
Alison Balsom says, “The concept of this project began decades ago, when I decided that Copland’s Quiet City was a work that everyone needed to hear – especially so as Copland reveals the scene so brilliantly via the solo trumpet and English horn. There is a true melancholy in this work that only a certain type of trumpet playing can ...
The Gesualdo Six: Lux Aeterna
“A sequence for the souls of the departed, to be heard by those who remember them” is how director Owain Park characterizes this latest release from The Gesualdo Six. Lux aeterna is a poignant reflection on the perennial themes of sorrow and consolation, given eloquent expression in the works of fourteen composers from the sixteenth century and the present day. Stylistic ...
Mariam Batsashvili: Romantic Piano Masters
Franz Liszt takes pride of place on Mariam Batsashvili’s second Warner Classics album, primarily devoted to evocative, technically formidable piano transcriptions of opera, song, and organ music. Among the works are Liszt’s realization of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a spectacular take on Bellini’s opera La sonnambula from Liszt’s great rival, Sigismund Thalberg, and Harold Bauer’s adaptation of ...
The Knights: The Kreutzer Project
The Brooklyn-based orchestral collective The Knights embodies the spirit of exploration with their new album release, The Kreutzer Project, a program that explores the connections between Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and the Tolstoy novella it inspired. The album includes new arrangements of both Beethoven’s and Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonatas, along with a new work entitled Kreutzings by The Knights’ co-founder Colin Jacobsen, ...
Haydn Piano Sonatas, Volume 11 – Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s survey of Haydn’s piano sonatas reaches its conclusion with this 11th and final volume. Bavouzet notes, “It has been eleven years since the launch of this project to present Haydn’s sonatas, not in their chronological order, but as collections juxtaposing works from different periods. The program for this final album was actually the first one to be devised: ...
Augustin Hadelich: Recuerdos
A subtle and profound Spanish theme runs through Recuerdos (Memories). Violinist Augustin Hadelich has conceived an album that unites three works for violin and orchestra and a piece originally written for solo guitar. For Britten’s Violin Concerto, Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, Hadelich is joined by the WDR Symphony Orchestra and its Chief Conductor, Cristian Măcelaru. ...
La Serenissima: Vivaldi’s Women
Vivaldi’s Women is the latest recording from the critically-acclaimed ensemble La Serenissima. The album showcases Vivaldi’s compositions written for the women of the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venetian institution founded in about 1340 that cared for unwanted children, often illegitimate or physically disadvantaged. The Pietà’s performers were taken from a group of women (not normally girls, contrary to popular belief) ...
Konstantin Vassiliev: Guitar Works, Volume 1 – Yuri Liberzon
Konstantin Vassiliev’s music synthesizes several different styles including jazz, Russian folk music, and contemporary Western traditions. This album contains music written over a 22-year period, with three works composed specifically for guitar soloist Yuri Liberzon. Hommage à Tom Jobin was inspired by one of the creators of the bossa nova style, while the melancholic and lyrical contrasts of Rose in ...
Brahms: Complete Symphonies – Danish Chamber Orchestra, Adam Fischer
Brahms was 43 years old when, after a long period of maturation, his First Symphony was published, marking a new phase in his musical development. The Second Symphony is traditionally seen as the pastoral element in the cycle, while the Third, with its melodic beauty, ends with astonishing serenity. The compelling finale of the Fourth Symphony represents a fitting summation ...
Makaris: The Galant David Rizzio
In the early 18th century, a number of the most popular traditional Scottish songs were bizarrely attributed to David Rizzio, who more than 150 years earlier had been brutally murdered while serving as secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots. The ensemble Makaris explores arrangements of the “Rizzio melodies” by galant-era composers including Francesco Geminiani, Johann Christian Bach, and James Oswald. ...
Lisa Batiashvili: Secret Love Letters
Violinist Lisa Batiashvili’s new album, Secret Love Letters, features evocative music inspired by late-Romantic literature and great virtuosos of the past. Her recording celebrates the fine art of concealment, of holding private passions just beneath the surface until they erupt. Joined by the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, as well as by pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, Batiashvili performs Karol Szymanowski’s First ...
Janoska Ensemble: The Big B’s
The four musicians of the Janoska Ensemble are brothers Ondrej, Roman, and František Janoska and their brother-in-law Julius Darvas. United by family ties and always rooted in classical music, their repertoire ranges from popular classics to their own compositions and unique arrangements of jazz, pop, and world music. When looking for a theme for their third album, the ensemble started ...
Haydn: Cello Concertos; Hindemith: Trauermusik – Christian Poltéra, Munich Chamber Orchestra
Joseph Haydn once remarked: “I was not a magician on any instrument, but I knew the power and effect of all of them.” This knowledge he used to good effect in his cello concertos, composed some twenty years apart for two different cellists in his orchestra at the court of Prince Esterházy. These two jewels in the cello repertoire are ...
Fanny & Felix Mendelssohn: Chamber Works – Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, born four years before her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, was an accomplished pianist and a prolific composer. When she died of a stroke, aged just forty-two, she left around 460 pieces of music, some 250 of which are songs. The difficulties of making a career in her own era have condemned much of her work to obscurity, a ...
Music of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari – Oviedo Philharmonic, Friedrich Haider
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari is famous for his operatic works in which he invented a new idiom by transplanting 18th-century Venetian culture into the 20th century. But almost all of the composer’s orchestral music dates from his final years and occupies a different expressive realm. The Suite veneziana resonates with melancholy, and Triptychon is a contemplative, passionate masterpiece of orchestration. Subtle use ...
Beethoven: Violin Concerto, Romances – Charlie Siem, Philharmonia Orchestra, Oleg Caetani
On his second album with Signum Records, internationally acclaimed violinist Charlie Siem is joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Oleg Caetani, to perform works by Beethoven. 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 what it means to be a true artist ...
Flauta Andina: 20th Century Andean Music for Flute and Piano – Daniel Velasco, Ellen Sommer
The rich variety of colors and rhythms in South American culture and music are an essential feature of this program, which focuses largely on music by composers from the Ecuadorian Andes. Opening with Sixto María Durán’s popular and crowd-pleasing Leyenda incásica, the theme of Ecuadorian dances continues in Jacinto Freire’s Suite, which also celebrates the flight of the condor. Virtuosity, ...
