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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Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works
Pianist Alice Sara Ott presents world premiere recordings of piano transcriptions of music by the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. The program includes some of the composer’s most iconic works from different films as well as from his studio albums Orphée and Englabörn. “What’s so incredible about Jóhannsson’s music,” writes Ott, “is how his compositions, originally written for larger ensembles ...
Schumann: Violin Concerto & Works for Violin and Piano by Clara and Robert Schumann
Violinist Midori — artistic director of the Ravinia Steans Music Institute program for piano and strings — presents an album of works by Robert and Clara Schumann with pianist Özgür Aydin and the Festival Strings Lucerne under the direction of Daniel Dodds. Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor was composed in 1853 but withheld from publication for more than ...
JS Bach: Johannes-Passion
Raphaël Pichon and his ensemble Pygmalion have emerged as superlative interpreters of Bach. They continue their exploration of the composer’s major works with this new recording of the St. John Passion. With their exemplary articulation and dynamic flexibility, the Pygmalion chorus is at the center of this striking drama. Raphaël Pichon’s precise direction restores the Passion’s original dramatic arc, instilling ...
Constellations
Winner of the 2019 St Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Music Competition, the Brompton Quartet was formed in 2018 at the Royal College of Music and has performed extensively around the UK, making debuts at major London concert venues including the Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, and the Southbank Centre. The string quartet’s debut album traces a musical journey through almost a millennium of ...
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Forward Into Light
Sarah Kirkland Snider’s latest album features four of the composer’s orchestral works performed by Metropolis Ensemble led by artistic director Andrew Cyr. The title work, Forward Into Light, is a commission for the New York Philharmonic inspired by the American women’s suffrage movement. The album includes a reimagining of the string quartet Snider wrote for the Emerson String Quartet as ...
Puccini: Orchestral Music
Written in 1892, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut catapulted him to international fame, but his early works — pre-Manon Lescaut — offer a fascinating insight into his development as a composer. John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London lead a journey through this development that includes student compositions and orchestral extracts from Puccini’s earliest operas. The Preludio sinfonico (loosely based on Wagner’s ...
Arcadian Dreams
Soprano Hannah De Priest, who is on an upward trajectory as a leading interpreter of 17th and 18th century repertoire, caps a breakout season (including performances with Haymarket Opera and Bella Voce, leading roles with Boston Early Music Festival, and debuts with Music of the Baroque and Bach in the City) with her debut solo album. Referencing both Greek mythology ...
Beethoven: The Last Three Sonatas
Regarded as one of the finest interpreters of classical and romantic repertoire, Dame Imogen Cooper presents Beethoven’s Sonatas No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110, and No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. “It has taken many years for me to perceive the last three sonatas by Beethoven as the evolving journey I ...
Nico Muhly: No Resting Place
Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars present world premiere recordings of works written for them by Nico Muhly. Phillips says that Muhly “immediately understood our particular sound and a succession of masterpieces followed, each as powerful as the last.” The title work is a setting of Jeremiah’s Lamentations, interspersed with contemporary interviews with people from the Windrush generation of Caribbean ...
Origines
Established in 2016, Trio Sypniewski comprises violinist Magdalena, violist Anna, and cellist Caroline Sypniewski. For their debut album, the three sisters return both to the birth of the string trio and to the origins of their own ensemble. The program includes Purcell’s fantasias for viols – intimate pieces enriched by the musicians’ historically informed performance practice – alongside trios by ...
Walton: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Orb and Sceptre
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra presents its first recording led by Kazuki Yamada who took the helm as music director in 2023, continuing the work of such eminent predecessors as Sir Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Andris Nelsons, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. The rogram, recorded live at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall, showcases three works by William Walton: the Coronation March Orb and ...
Coleridge-Taylor, Dvořák, Stewart
Gil Shaham’s latest album with conductor Eric Jacobsen and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra explores the violin concerto as a vehicle for cultural memory and continuity. The program pairs Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 80, and Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 53, with the world-premiere recording of “F. Harper,” from The Famous People by Curtis ...
Nadia
WindSync’s new album pays homage to the French composer, conductor, music theorist, and legendary composition pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who wielded immense influence over American music and musicians. Boulanger found a way to nurture each composer’s individual voice, and in doing so sowed the seeds of the kaleidoscopic breadth of styles that emerged in American music in the 20th century. The ...
Piano Music 2016–22
Myron Silberstein, Brooklyn-born (in 1974) and a long-term resident of Chicago, belongs to that centuries-old tradition of the composer-pianist. But here the distant roots are not so much in Mozart and Beethoven as in Copland and Barber. Silberstein’s language echoes the tradition of earlier American composers like Paul Creston, Peter Mennin, and Vincent Persichetti, and his tonal harmony may remind ...
Patrice Michaels: On the Joys of Recorded Music (single)
Cedille Records marks the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. March 15, 1933) with the digital single release of Patrice Michaels’s “On the Joys of Recorded Music.” Performed by soprano Alisa Jordheim and pianist Kuang-Hao Huang, the previously unreleased song was originally intended for Michaels’s cycle The Long View, featured on the album Notorious RBG ...
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time
Comprising violinist Olivia De Prato, cellist Ashley Bathgate, clarinetist Ken Thomson, and pianist Karl Larson on piano, the Anzû Quartet brings to the table a vast collective experience with groups like Bang on a Can All-Stars, Mivos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Ensemble Signal, and Bearthoven. For their second album in as many years, this new-music supergroup presents the work that inspired ...
17(67)
Cuban-American cellist Dr. Tommy Mesa second solo album features works for cello and piano by Saint-Saëns, Jocelyn Morlock, Jules Massenet, Ernesto Lecuona, Florence Price, Francisco Braga, Andrea Casarrubios, Marlos Nobre, Jennifer Higdon, Ernest Bloch, and Kinan Azmeh. The album title draws its meaning from two worlds: 1767, the birth year of the Nicolò Gagliano cello Mesa plays throughout the album, ...
Leonardo Vinci: Artaserse
Acclaimed for their historically informed productions 17th- and 18th-century operas and oratorios, Haymarket Opera Company, presents the rare operatic gem Artaserse (1730) by composer Leonardo Vinci. This three-act opera seria centers on the Persian prince, Artaserse, who must bring his father’s murderer to justice amid betrayal, deceit, and mistaken identity. All female roles in the original performances of this opera ...
Szymanowski: Sinfonia Concertante Op. 60, Mazurkas Op. 50
Considered to be the most gifted and promising pianist of his generation in Poland, Szymon Nehring is the only Pole to have won first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv (2017). He was also a finalist at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw at age 19. His new album is dedicated to Karol Szymanowski, one of ...
Or. (Couperin & Vivaldi)
For her new recording, entitled Or (light), Franco-American cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton presents arrangements of works by Couperin and Vivaldi. The album begins with the first and third of Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres — the Lamentations of Jeremiah, originally scored for soprano and continuo. Wieder-Atherton says, “I had long been looking for an instrument that could accompany my cello in the ...
