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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Rachmaninoff: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom – Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Kaspars Putniņš
The music of the Russian Orthodox Church was an essential part of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s musical background. His Vespers has long been admired as a summit of Russian liturgical music. It has unfortunately tended to overshadow the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, his earlier large-scale sacred composition. The Liturgy consists of a sequence of prayers, psalms, and hymns, which are sung ...
Magdalena Hoffmann: Nightscapes
Night falls in diverse ways in Magdalena Hoffmann’s Deutsche Grammophon debut album. Nightscapes sees the German harpist dive deep into the intimate, mysterious, magical world of night music, as well as exploring the theme of dance. Its program spans everything from the austere beauty of Britten’s Suite for Harp Op. 83 and languid lyricism of Pizzetti’s Sogno to the folk‑like colors of Tournier’s La danse ...
Music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Adrian Leaper
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer, conductor, and activist who battled against racial prejudice with his music. The Hiawatha trilogy, with its stirring overture, established Coleridge-Taylor as one of Britain’s leading young composers and stimulated commissions in a wide variety of music. The Othello Suite was written for a stage production of the play, its powerful and contrasting themes illustrating ...
Orchestral Music of Maurice Ravel: Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Sakari Oramo
Maurice Ravel composed a number of works which have become classics of the repertoire both for solo piano and for orchestra. On the present disc, all except one work were first conceived for piano, which raises the question how it is possible to transfer such pianistic music to the orchestra without making it sound like a mere “colorized” version. Ravel’s ...
Reflections: Scott Joplin Reconsidered – Lara Downes
Iconoclastic pianist Lara Downes takes a fresh look at the music of Scott Joplin on her album Reflections: Scott Joplin Reconsidered, the newest release in her Rising Sun Music series, which brings to life the rich, 200-year lineage of Black composers in America. This recording looks back through a modern lens to explore the many layers of Joplin’s creative vision, as well ...
Boundless: Pablo Barragán, Sophie Pacini
Boundless: that’s how one might describe these sonatas by Sergei Prokofiev, Mieczysław Weinberg, Leonard Bernstein, and Francis Poulenc. All of them, except the one by Poulenc, were composed during the Second World War, each exploring in a different way the boundaries of the genre. While Weinberg draws on klezmer, the music of his childhood, and Bernstein on jazz, Prokofiev and ...
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 ...
