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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John Williams: The Berlin Concert
Two legends shared the stage this past autumn – in a glorious debut, John Williams conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time. This recording, captured live by Deutsche Grammophon during a series of sold-out concerts, presents some of the world’s best-known film music performed by one of the world’s great orchestras. The album is being released as Williams prepares to celebrate his ...
Choir of Westminster Abbey: Music of Jonathan Dove, Judith Weir, Matthew Martin
Throughout its history the Church of England has performed the conspicuous role of musical patron, and while this role may have changed in emphasis across the generations, it has nevertheless provided a platform for choral music, in which the shifting aesthetics of each age are embodied. This recording provides a vivid and powerful contemporary illustration of such music by three ...
Uncovered, Volume 2: Florence B. Price – Catalyst Quartet
The Catalyst Quartet’s new digital album is the second issue of a multi-volume anthology highlighting string quartet works by historically important Black composers which aims to bring greater awareness and programming of their music. Volume 2 of Uncovered is entirely devoted to the six known string quartet and piano quintet works of composer Florence B. Price – including four world-premiere ...
Valentina Lisitsa: Scriabin
Valentina Lisitsa marks her debut on the Naïve label with a release commemorating the 150th anniversary of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s birth. The program includes eighteen short pieces spanning his body of work, from his early anthology of 24 preludes – modeled after those of Frédéric Chopin – to works like the frenzied Flammes Sombres written in 1914, just one ...
The Bird of Life: Late Romantic Flute Treasures – Birgit Ramsl
During the last decade of the 19th century, a generation of central European composers emerged that was to exert a powerful influence on the current of contemporary music. Yet, for the most part, their works for flute remain little known and a number of pieces included in this album are world premieres. Egon Kornauth, Vally Weigl, Franz Mittler, and Felix ...
Metanoia: Ensemble K, Simone Menezes
The concept of metanoia – that, which goes beyond thought – most commonly describes a change in the way of seeing and thinking about things. With this recording, Italian-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes and her chamber orchestra Ensemble K, together with the choir Sequenza 9.3, go on a musical journey to find moments of metanoia in the lives and works of ...
Horn and Piano: A Cor Basse Recital – Teunis van der Zwart, Alexander Melnikov
Hornist Teunis van der Zwart and pianist Alexander Melnikov pay tribute to Giovanni Punto, now unknown to most music lovers, even though he truly established the cor basse (horn focused on the low register) by devoting no less than sixteen concertos to it. It was he who inspired Beethoven’s famous Horn Sonata, and the pieces by Franz Danzi and Ferdinand ...
Ruperto Chapí: String Quartets, Volume 2 – Cuarteto Latinoamericano
Ruperto Chapí won a reputation as a prolific composer of zarzuela (Spanish lyric opera). He wrote more than a hundred, including the one that made Chapí a household name in Spain – La Revoltosa. Towards the end of his life, Chapí became interested in chamber music, and beginning in 1903, he undertook the composition of his four string quartets, works that ...
Bob Chilcott: Circlesong – Houston Chamber Choir, Robert Simpson
A work filled with ambition, Bob Chilcott’s Circlesong is a musical portrayal of the human life cycle as captured in the indigenous poetry of North America. Based on poetry from the Chinook, Comanche, Dakota, Eskimo, Iroquois, Kwakiutl, Navajo, Ojibwa, Pueblo, Seminole, Sioux, and Yaqui traditions, the thirteen movements, in seven parts, mark the different stages of life, from birth and ...
Leclair: Violin Concertos – Leila Schayegh, La Cetra Baroque Orchestra
Leila Schayegh completes her series of recordings of all the violin concertos by Jean-Marie Leclair with this third release. Leclair grew up in Lyon and was trained as a dancer and violinist, later concentrating entirely on playing the violin. In Italy, he had lessons with the distinguished teacher Giovanni Battista Somis and then went to Paris, where he briefly held ...
Brahms: Late Piano Works – Paul Lewis
Paul Lewis explores the world of late works by Johannes Brahms. The old master, far from growing more sedate, deploys a palette of infinite colors and sensibilities in his last four collections for solo piano. By turns tender and dazzling, intimate and tempestuous, these pieces appear to us as their composer’s final confidences.
Edgar Moreau: Transmission
Edgar Moreau salutes his family heritage and highlights landmarks in his artistic development with Transmission – music by Ernest Bloch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Bruch, and Maurice Ravel, recorded with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor Michael Sanderling. Moreau’s mother is of Polish-Jewish extraction and all five works on the album have a connection with Jewish culture. The ...
Beethoven: The Conquering Hero (Complete Works for Cello and Piano) – Jennifer Kloetzel, Robert Koenig
Jennifer Kloetzel’s lifelong journey with Beethoven began early: she was eight years old when her teacher placed the composer’s second cello sonata on her music stand, opening the door to an odyssey of intrigue and, ultimately, obsession with the composer’s music. Since then, rarely has a day passed without Beethoven being a part of her life. Kloetzel has studied and ...
George Walker: Five Piano Sonatas – Steven Beck
A sequence of piano sonatas offers one of the most direct looks into a composer’s most private and most practical obsessions. George Walker is one of the few leading American composers of the 20th century to produce as many as five piano sonatas over the course of fifty years. Taken together, they securely chart a lifetime of stylistic change. Pianist ...
Escualo5: Astor Piazzolla
Astor Piazzolla’s music is played in concert halls around the world and has been arranged for the most varied forces: symphony orchestra, string quartet, brass ensemble, mandolin orchestra, and harpsichord. Taking their name from Piazzolla’s Escualo (Shark), the five musicians who make up Escualo5 have a different approach, replicating the formation that Piazzolla performed with for much of his career: ...
Locke: The Flat Consort – Fretwork
Matthew Locke was born 400 years ago in 1622, and while he is often ranked as one of England’s finest composers, he is still unaccountably neglected. His music may not be as immediately appealing as his immediate successor, Henry Purcell, nor as wide-ranging as William Byrd, yet his forceful musical personality and luxuriant technique place him in the first echelon ...
Mendelssohn: Complete Solo Piano Music, Volume 6 – Howard Shelley
Howard Shelley’s six-volume survey of the complete solo piano music of Felix Mendelssohn offers a welcome opportunity to revisit and reassess this repertoire. As we now know, Mendelssohn composed or began nearly two hundred works for piano. Nevertheless, he saw only about seventy through to print. In this, the final installment of the series, Shelley focuses on late works and ...
Telemann: Viola Concertos – Antoine Tamestit, Berlin Academy for Ancient Music
A precursor in this field as in so many others, Georg Philipp Telemann gave the viola its very first masterpieces, immediately establishing it as a solo instrument in its own right. Alongside Sabine Fehlandt and the musicians of the Berlin Academy for Ancient Music, Antoine Tamestit pays splendid tribute to this pioneering music, which blends melodic charm and contrapuntal rigor ...
New Year’s Concert 2022: Vienna Philharmonic, Daniel Barenboim
There are few concerts in the world that are awaited with as much excitement as the New Year’s Concert from Vienna. For 2022, the Vienna Philharmonic ushered in the New Year with a concert conducted by Daniel Barenboim for the third time at the magnificent Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. The concert was broadcast to over 90 countries all ...
From Brighton to Brooklyn: Elena Urioste, Tom Poster
Elena Urioste is a musician, yogi, writer, and entrepreneur, while Tom Poster is a musician whose skills and passions extend well beyond the conventional role of the concert pianist; they are musical and (now married) life partners. From Brighton to Brooklyn is an exploration and celebration of their British and American backgrounds and mutual fascination with music from each other’s ...
