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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Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5, Schulhoff: Five Pieces – Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Manfred Honeck
Reference Recordings presents Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in a significant new interpretation from conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. It’s coupled with Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces, newly arranged for large orchestra by Honeck and Tomáš Ille. The album was recorded live in 2022 in historic Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, in superb audiophile sound. Honeck ...
Emmanuel Despax: Après un rêve
Pianist Emmanuel Despax’s latest album, Après un rêve, is a tribute to the beauty and elegance of the Belle Époque era. Despax showcases his masterful technique and interpretation of the music, bringing new life to these timeless works. Highlights include Cécile Chaminade’s Nocturne and Henri Duparc’s Aux étoiles, alongside Poulenc’s Les Soirées de Nazelles, Debussy’s Claire de lune, Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, and of ...
Mythes: James Ehnes, Andrew Armstrong
Composed in 1915, Karol Szymanowski’s Mythes is a three-movement work consisting of miniature tone poems based on Greek mythology. Late romantic and impressionist in style, the composer’s travels to Sicily and north Africa without doubt influenced the sumptuous sound world he created in this work. Mythes is the opening work on this eclectic recital album from violinist James Ehnes and ...
Karl Jenkins: One World – World Choir For Peace, World Orchestra For Peace
Decca Records presents a new album from Sir Karl Jenkins, one of the world’s most-performed living composers. One World deals with a fractured world and heralds a vision of a peaceful and egalitarian planet. The music is scored in Jenkins’ inimitable style that resists categorization and has had a truly global reach. To create this vision, he takes inspiration from texts ...
J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach: Father and Son – Einav Yarden
Pianist Einav Yarden writes: “When I first discovered C.P.E Bach’s keyboard music, I remember being completely amazed by its versatility and originality, by its inventiveness, spectrum of expression, and its boldness. I was equally astounded by how much he preceded his time, that only one generation away from his father’s High Baroque, and long before the Viennese Classical School fully ...
Byrd: Mass for Five Voices – The Gesualdo Six
The Gesualdo Six and its director Owain Park have established a formidable reputation for intelligently planned programs, flawlessly performed. Their latest release amply satisfies both criteria. Park writes in the booklet notes: “At the heart of the collection of works on this album is William Byrd’s Mass for five voices, probably the last of a set of three Masses he ...
Eric Coates: Orchestral Works, Volume 3 – BBC Philharmonic, John Wilson
John Wilson’s third volume devoted to music by Eric Coates combines some of the composer’s large-scale works with miniatures and two marches. The Cinderella Phantasy frames the well-known fairy-tale from Cinderella’s perspective. The Three Men is to some extent autobiographical, as Coates explores his love of his native Nottinghamshire countryside, his love for London, and his love of the sea. ...
Mozart: Piano Concertos K. 107, 175, 336 – Robert Levin, Academy of Ancient Music, Laurence Cummings
This release features Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 5, Church Sonata No. 17, Concerto movement in G major from Nannerl’s Music Book (reconstructed by Robert Levin), and the Piano Concertos K. 107 based on the sonatas by Johann Christian Bach. The recording is part of a landmark cycle which Robert Levin began in 1993. Upon completion, this cycle will become the ...
Ysaÿe: Six Sonatas for Violin Solo – Hilary Hahn
Violinist Hilary Hahn offers her latest album with Deutsche Grammophon: a recording of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for Violin Solo, Op. 27. Composed beginning in 1923, these six sonatas are among the supreme feats of technical virtuosity in the violin repertoire. Hahn’s interpretations see her come full circle as a direct musical descendant of Ysaÿe himself. “Just as Eugène Ysaÿe was ...
Handel: Water & Fire – B’Rock Orchestra, Dmitry Sinkovsky
George Frideric Handel’s Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks were both written for royal open-air ceremonies and as such may well have been drowned out by the noise of pyrotechnics and the waves of the Thames. Still, after Handel’s lifetime, they quickly became audience favorites. This recording captures a live performance in Gent, Belgium, with the B’Rock Orchestra ...
Yunchan Lim Live from The Cliburn – Liszt: Transcendental Etudes
In June 2022, Yunchan Lim became the youngest person ever to win gold at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. His performances throughout showcased a “magical ability” and a “natural, instinctive quality” (La Scena) that astounded listeners around the world. As Jury Chair Marin Alsop expressed: “Yunchan is that rare artist who brings profound musicality and prodigious technique organically together.” ...
Jonathan Leshnoff: Elegy, Violin Concerto No. 2, Of Thee I Sing – Noah Bendix-Balgley, Canterbury Voices, Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Alexander Mickelthwate
This is the Naxos label’s fifth album devoted to the music of leading American composer, Jonathan Leshnoff. He was Grammy-nominated for his album Violins of Hope and is among the most frequently performed of living composers. The themes of these recent works are remembrance, memorialization, and hopefulness. Elegy addresses ideas of harmony and discord through contrasting thematic ideas. His Violin ...
Shea-Kim Duo: All Roads
The award-winning Shea-Kim Duo – violinist Brendan Shea and pianist Yerin Kim – have been performing together for over a decade. In “All Roads,” the duo explores the evolving musical styles and sounds that passed through the cultural Mecca of Vienna. “We wanted to present composers who were connected to Vienna in increasingly distant ways, like travelers along a long ...
Christian Li: Discovering Mendelssohn
Decca Classics releases the new album from Australian-Chinese violinist Christian Li. Having topped the classical charts with his debut album in 2021 (with which he became the youngest artist ever to record Vivaldi’s Four Seasons), the award-winning musician releases his second album, entitled “Discovering Mendelssohn.” Here, Li follows the journeys of Felix Mendelssohn – whose music was influenced by travel ...
Takács Quartet: Music of Dvořák & Coleridge-Taylor
Antonín Dvořák’s String Quartet Op. 106 and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Fantasiestücke make a particularly satisfying pairing on this album by the Takács Quartet. The two works are complementary and contemporaneous, albeit from very different stages in their composers’ careers. Dvořák’s quartet is one of the first major works to result from his return to Prague in 1895 after a lengthy sojourn ...
Notturna: Calcutta 1789
Calcutta 1789, the latest album by the ensemble Notturna, is a fascinating portrait of 18th century musical life in India during the British colonial period. Under the direction of Christopher Palameta, the program combines traditional Indian music with works by Purcell, Handel, J.C. Bach, and other European composers. Notturna’s period instrumentalists are joined by the sounds of the sitar, played ...
Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 20, 21, 23, 27 – Elizabeth Sombart, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Pierre Vallet
Mozart’s piano concertos are peerless examples of the genre, providing not only a unique insight into his creative world but also his own supreme ability as a virtuoso pianist. Following the success of her recent Beethoven cycle, French pianist Elizabeth Sombart plays four of Mozart’s sublime masterpieces with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The four great concertos on this album span ...
Rachmaninoff: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3, Isle of the Dead – Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin
Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra present the final part of their survey of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s symphonic works. Featuring three major compositions – the Second and Third Symphonies, and the symphonic poem Isle of the Dead – the album follows on the same artists’ 2021 pairing of Symphony No. 1 and the Symphonic Dances, which garnered widespread critical acclaim. The new album again draws on ...
Lawrence Brownlee: Rising
Tenor Lawrence Brownlee releases his newest album, Rising, on Warner Classics. For the project, Brownlee has commissioned six of today’s leading African American composers – Damien Sneed, Brandon Spencer, Jasmine Barnes, Joel Thompson, and Shawn E. Okpebholo – to set poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to song, including poems by Alice Dunbar Nelson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, ...
Haydn: Piano Trios – Guarneri Trio Prague
Since their debut in 1986, Čeněk Pavlík, Marek Jerie, and Ivan Klánský have ranked among the finest chamber musicians of their generation. To mark more than three decades of playing together, the Guarneri Trio Prague immortalizes works by Haydn, playing with all the expressive intensity and spirit that we have come to expect of them. The trio drew the attention ...