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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Early Italian Cello Concertos: Elinor Frey, Rosa Barocca, Claude Lapalme
Cellist, gambist, and researcher Elinor Frey has made it her mission to enrich the cello repertoire. Fascinated by the origins of the instrument, she takes listeners on a journey to Italy, the country where cello music first appeared at the turn of the 18th century. This new recording of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Giuseppe Tartini, and Leonardo ...
New York Youth Symphony: Works by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery, Valerie Coleman
In the midst of the COVID pandemic, the remarkably resourceful personnel and musicians of the New York Youth Symphony, with Music Director Michael Repper, found a way to come together during a time of separation to make their debut recording. Featuring four works by three African American women composers – Florence Price, Valerie Coleman, and Jessie Montgomery – the orchestra’s ...
Music for Ukraine: Daniel Hope, Alexey Botvinov
United in their support for Ukraine, violinist Daniel Hope and Ukrainian pianist Alexey Botvinov recently joined forces to perform A Concert for Peace from Dresden’s Frauenkirche and Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche. This album recorded at Teldex Studios features a program of works by composers Valentin Silvestrov, Myroslav Skoryk, and Jan Freidlin. Everyone involved provided their services free of charge, and both the artists and Deutsche Grammophon will be donating ...
Stephen Hough: Schubert Piano Sonatas
Pianist Stephen Hough has proved himself a natural Schubertian. On this recording, he performs the late G major sonata, D 894, which followed such landmarks as the “Great” C major symphony and Schubert’s last string quartet, and explores similarly expansive terrain. The A major sonata, D 664, is an earlier, genial work. These frame the brief D 769a fragment, which ...
Sarah Cahill: The Future Is Female – Volume 1, In Nature
Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, presents the first release in a new recording project. The Future is Female is a three-volume series which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These recordings feature more than seventy compositions by women around ...
Move: The Trumpet As Movie Star – Romain Leleu
Move – the name of this album – is also the title of a concerto written by Baptiste Trotignon receiving its recording premiere. The work pays tribute to major composers of film music whose iconic scores form the backdrop in this album starring Romain Leleu. Taking us on a cinematic journey through the music of Nino Rota, Michel Legrand, Ennio ...
Sibelius & Nielsen: Violin Concertos – Johan Dalene, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds
Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius were both born in 1865. Both also received their first musical training on the violin, earning valuable insights when it came to writing for the instrument. Their respective violin concertos were composed some six years apart – Sibelius’s in 1904-05 and Nielsen’s in 1911 – and belong to the most performed works of either composer. ...
Boyd Meets Girl: Songs of Love and Despair
Sono Luminus releases Songs of Love and Despair, a follow-up to the self-titled 2016 release of the guitar-cello duo Boyd Meets Girl. The married duo—comprising Australian guitarist Rupert Boyd and American cellist Laura Metcalf—are also well-known as artistic directors of the lauded New York concert series GatherNYC, “known for thoughtful, intimate events curated with refreshing eclecticism by its founders” (The ...
Ruth Slenczynska: My Life in Music
Having recorded for the Decca Gold Label in the 1950s and 60s, Ruth Slenczynska returns to the label nearly 60 years later to release a new solo piano album, recorded in 2021, entitled My Life in Music. The album celebrates her remarkable life and performing career which began as a child prodigy in the 1920s and continues nine decades later. Born ...
Cantus: The COVID-19 Sessions
Signum Classics releases the latest full-length album from the vocal group Cantus. Recorded in March 2020 at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, The COVID-19 Sessions came together quickly as society began to shut down amidst the growing outbreak in the United States. Concert dates were being canceled and it was clear there would be a limited window in which ...
Sibelius: Complete Symphonies – Oslo Philharmonic, Klaus Mäkelä
Decca Classics presents Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s debut album, a complete cycle of Jean Sibelius’s Symphonies, plus the tone poem Tapiola and three late fragments. Mäkelä directs the Oslo Philharmonic, an orchestra with a deep, historic connection to the music of the Finnish composer. The Oslo Philharmonic has been performing the music of Sibelius for over 100 years, with the ...
Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5 – Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma
Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, and Yo-Yo Ma’s new album erases the border between orchestral and chamber music, presenting two of Beethoven’s iconic symphonies in intimate arrangements that maintain the power and immediacy of the works. Beethoven for Three transports listeners to the turn of the nineteenth century, when audiences would have been more familiar with the composer’s music in arrangements for ...
Vivaldi/Bach – Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini
Vivaldi/Bach is the latest recording from Rinaldo Alessandrini and his Concerto Italiano. The album features keyboard arrangements of Antonio Vivaldi’s first published concertos, L’estro armonico, and transcriptions in different instrumental scorings of J.S. Bach’s concertos after Vivaldi. Alessandrini conducts and plays solo harpsichord on the program, joined by four fellow Italian harpsichordists. The program alternates between original concertos and adaptations ...
Dan Locklair: Requiem & Other Choral Works – Choir of Royal Holloway, Southern Sinfonia, Rupert Gough
The music of Dan Locklair is widely performed throughout the United States and abroad. His prolific output includes symphonic works, a ballet, an opera, and numerous solo, chamber, vocal, and choral compositions. The Choir of Royal Holloway is considered to be one of the finest university choirs in Britain. Under director Rupert Gough, the group performs a selection of choral ...
When There Are No Words: Revolutionary Works for Oboe and Piano – Alex Klein, Phillip Bush
Grammy Award-winner Alex Klein, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal oboe emeritus, and pianist Phillip Bush perform works by composers from both sides of the Atlantic who were caught up in or deeply moved by 20th-century political turmoil. The Brazilian-born oboe virtuoso’s passionate project, with its underlying appeal for tolerance, encompasses works by Czech, German, British, American, and Brazilian composers. Much of the ...
Emily Granger: In Transit
Inspired by her life as an American artist living in Australia, Emily Granger makes her solo recording debut performing contemporary works that reveal the breadth and beauty of harp music from the two countries. With themes of travel and isolation, serenity and solitude, this music paints a vivid portrait of an artist’s life “in transit” between opposite sides of the ...
Mendelssohn: Piano Concertos – Lars Vogt, Paris Chamber Orchestra
Pianist-conductor Lars Vogt makes his first recording with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, where he became Music Director in 2020. This album of Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Concertos and Capriccio brillant continues Vogt’s recordings of cornerstone works within the classic piano concerto literature, conducting from the keyboard. Previous releases include the complete piano concertos of Beethoven and Brahms with the Royal Northern ...
Beethoven: The Last Sonatas – Gerardo Teissonnière
Steinway & Sons releases Beethoven’s last piano sonatas (Op. 109, 110, and 111), marking pianist Gerardo Teissonnière’s debut on the label. Teissonnière – who began his musical studies in Puerto Rico and now resides in Cleveland where he is on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music – began performing all of Beethoven’s works for piano and orchestra in ...
Julie Cooper: Continuum
British composer Julie Cooper presents her commercial album debut, composed during the COVID-19 lockdowns. This musical diary represents Cooper’s reflections on the continuous cycle of life as experienced so vividly by many during this time. This theme is explored most prominently in the central work, Contemplation Suite, featuring soprano Grace Davidson. The album opens with the title track, Continuum, narrated ...
Stella: Renaissance Gems and Their Reflections – ORA Singers, Suzi Digby
Spanish composers of the sixteenth century followed a long tradition of writing music in honor of the Virgin Mary. The composer Tomás Luis de Victoria, a priest and a scholar too, wrote multiple settings of devotion to Mary of which this collection showcases some real gems. The album sees the ORA Singers continue their series of great Renaissance masterworks being ...
