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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Bruce Liu: Highlights from the 18th International Chopin Piano Competition
Deutsche Grammophon presents recordings made live during the various stages of the 18th International Chopin Piano Competition by Bruce Liu, the newly crowned winner of the world’s most prestigious competition for classical musicians. The jury awarded the top prize to the 24-year-old Canadian pianist immediately after the final round at Warsaw’s National Philharmonic. The competition was first held in 1927 and, until the arrival of ...
A Scattered Light in Winter – Westminster Williamson Voices, James Jordan
The Westminster Williamson Voices, named for the founder of Westminster Choir College, John Finley Williamson, is praised by reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Williamson Voices is the resident choir of the Choral Institute at Oxford (CIO), now in its sixth year. For their latest recording, conductor James Jordan writes: “I think when life challenges us, our common human ...
20th Century Music for Flute and Guitar – Britta Jacobs, Irene Kalisvaart
This album of 20th-century masterpieces for flute and guitar features works composed especially for this combination of instruments plus arrangements of works by Béla Bartók and Ravi Shankar. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Sonatine is considered to be one of the finest compositions for flute and guitar, contrasting joyfulness with poignant melodies. The warm sound of the alto flute is given expressive range ...
Anne Gastinel, Claire Désert: Chopin
The latest album from frequent collaborators cellist Anne Gastinel and pianist Claire Désert offers a program of music by Frédéric Chopin. “When one thinks of Chopin,” says Désert, “one immediately thinks of his piano works, of the vocality and lyricism that permeate his style. And if there is one instrument that lends itself to that, it’s the cello.” Chopin’s Cello ...
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons – Francisco Fullana, Apollo’s Fire, Jeannette Sorrell
Apollo’s Fire and Jeannette Sorrell team up with Spanish violin virtuoso Francisco Fullana and his 1735 Guarneri violin for this joyous romp through the countryside. Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire are known for bringing Vivaldi’s masterpiece to life as the revolutionary acts of musical storytelling the composer intended. From a lonely shepherd-boy on a hillside to a delightfully drunken harvest party ...
Schubert: Impromptus & Moments Musicaux – Alexandre Tharaud
The program for Alexandre Tharaud’s first Erato album dedicated to Schubert comprises the four Impromptus, D. 899, the six Moments musicaux, and, in Tharaud’s own transcription for piano, four excerpts from the stage music for Rosamunde. When Tharaud performed the Impromptus at London’s Wigmore Hall in 2014, The Guardian wrote: “He got to the heart of the beauties and abysses ...
Pierné: Ramuntcho & Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied Suites – Lille National Orchestra, Darrell Ang
Composer, conductor, and organist Gabriel Pierné wrote in a wide variety of genres, from operas to pieces for solo piano. His orchestral music for the stage shows the utmost refinement and clarity as well as wit and charm in the finest French tradition. His colorful and evocative score for Ramuntcho is rich in Basque dance rhythms, all beautifully textured. Set ...
Newberry Consort: A Mexican Christmas
The Newberry Consort and EnsAmble Ad-Hoc present A Mexican Christmas, an album of 17th century traditional music for worship and celebration. The collection features pieces commonly heard in both liturgical service and in the streets. The music evokes the solemnity and fanfare heard in Mexico City’s convents and plazas, with jubilant vocals and lively strings, guitars, and percussion. A variety ...
Bach: English Suites Nos. 1-3 – Vladimir Ashkenazy
Brought together on this double album are Vladimir Ashkenazy’s latest Bach recording of the English Suites Nos. 1-3 and his first-ever Bach recording from 1965, the Concerto in D minor. An astonishing 56 years and a lifetime’s experience of this timeless music span the two recordings, marking the longest exclusive association between pianist and record label in history. This new ...
Batucada: South American Guitar Music – Graham Anthony Devine
This recital offers a kaleidoscopic array of styles unified by South America’s national instrument, the guitar. Titans of Latin American music such as Piazzolla and Barrios Mangoré are represented, but so too are distinctive composers less well known outside of their own countries. Genres such as milonga, Venezuelan waltz, and choro are featured, in music suffused with melancholy and vivacious, ...
Canadian Brass: Canadiana
The new recording by the Canadian Brass – the most celebrated and enduring brass quintet in history – is the iconic ensemble’s first ever all-Canadian album. The album celebrates the popular Canadian artists that the group loves to listen to and has impressed them through their career. Canadiana includes songs by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Drake, H.E.R., Shawn Mendes, Rush, Bruce ...
Lara Downes: Migration Music
Pianist and curator Lara Downes continues her transformative Rising Sun Music series of monthly digital EPs with Migration Music, a three-part focus on music commemorating the Great Migration—the exodus of Black Americans out of the rural South during the first part of the 20 th century. Downes says, “From about 1915 to 1970, there was a great migration of more ...
Music of Camille Saint-Saëns – Jinjoo Cho, Appassionato, Mathieu Herzog
Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, Havanaise, Violin Concerto No. 3, and Romance: these pieces composed between 1859 and 1887 are among the most celebrated works by Camille Saint-Saëns. They are also signature pieces of violinist Jinjoo Cho, first prize winner of the 2014 Indianapolis International Violin Competition. “In a way there is a sense of personal nostalgia that I associate with ...
Chopin: Complete Nocturnes – Stephen Hough
Across Great Britain and Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, the title “nocturne” was most commonly attached to a kind of vocal piece, most often a duet, performed among family or friends to enliven an evening gathering (hence the name). When the title appeared on works for solo piano (John Field, an Irish composer resident in Russia, ...
Price: Symphony No. 3, The Mississippi River, Ethiopia’s Shadow in America
Florence Price was one of the most versatile and accomplished American musicians of her generation whose unstoppable creativity and earliest successes were set against the backdrop of 1930s economic depression. The Third Symphony expresses aspects of Price’s cultural heritage in a symphonic framework. The world premiere recording of Ethiopia’s Shadow in America traces the American experience of enslaved Africans, while ...
Mozart: Wind Concertos – London Symphony Orchestra
Principal players of the London Symphony Orchestra display their virtuosic talents on this album of concertos for wind instruments by Mozart, recorded in concert with conductor Jaime Martín. Three of Mozart’s wind concertos are included: the Oboe Concerto, K. 314, with soloist Olivier Stankiewicz; the Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, performed by former LSO Principal Andrew Marriner; and the Horn Concerto ...
Freiburg Baroque Orchestra: Concerti all’arrabbiata
Seventeenth-century Italy not only consumed great quantities of chili peppers, it was also the birthplace of virtuoso, explosive music. The concertos of Giovanni Benedetto Platti, Antonio Vivaldi, and Francesco Geminiani, with their furiously buzzing strings and fleet woodwinds, are perfect examples. These works inspired their musical neighbors in Germany, including Georg Philipp Telemann, who penned a concerto for two intrepid ...
Here With You – Anthony McGill, Gloria Chien
Anthony McGill, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, and pianist Gloria Chien, a frequent performer with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, make their commercial recording debut as a duo on Here with You. The album holds early and late German Romantic masterworks they’ve treasured throughout their 15 years of musical collaboration. Johannes Brahms’ Clarinet Sonata No. 1 ...
Gretchaninov: All-Night Vigil – Latvian Radio Choir, Sigvards Klava
The award-winning Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Klava turns its attention to the music of Alexander Grechaninov, one of the masters of Russian sacred music. His All-Night Vigil is a fitting continuation to the choir’s albums of sacred music by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. Together with the two latter names, Grechaninov’s All-Night Vigil, completed in 1912, belongs to the central ...
Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason: Muse
Sheku and Isata, the charismatic siblings from the talented Kanneh-Mason family, release their first duo album, Muse – a selection of music for piano and cello composed by Samuel Barber and Sergei Rachmaninoff. The recording on Decca Classics captures the siblings’ musicality and refined skill from years of performing together – both at home and in recitals worldwide. The Rachmaninoff and Barber cello sonatas ...
