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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Fretwork: An Elizabethan Christmas
Viol consort Fretwork and mezzo soprano Helen Charlston explore the more reflective and somber Christmas celebrations of Elizabethan England, in a collection of works by William Byrd, Anthony Holborne, Orlando Gibbons, and Martin Peerson. With celebrations confined strictly to the twelve days from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, the preceding Advent was regarded as a time of religious introspection, with music ...
Ralph Vaughan Williams: An Oxford Christmas
This recording focuses on arrangements made by Ralph Vaughan Williams for the Oxford Book of Carols (1928). The preface tells us: “Variety in the method of singing is even more important than with hymns, and the verses should never be sung straight through all in the same way.” In this spirit, conductor William Vann has prepared the carols with a ...
In the Bleak Midwinter: Christmas Carols from King’s College, Cambridge
In the Bleak Midwinter reflects a Christmas that was unlike any other in recent history. Much of the music on this album was heard around the world as part of the 103rd Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, a service that has been broadcast live every year since 1930 from the Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge. But for Christmas Eve ...
A Star in the East – Ronn McFarlane, Carolyn Surrick, Jackie Moran
Viola da gambist Carolyn Surrick and lutenist Ronn McFarlane release a new holiday album, A Star in the East, featuring reimagined traditional Christmas favorites alongside new works by both McFarlane and Surrick. They weave a tapestry of music ranging from 15th-century Europe to 21st-century America, seamlessly held together by the timelessness of their instruments and their extraordinary musicianship. For A ...
The Knights Before Christmas
The Knights Before Christmas is a world-premiere recording of holiday music from numerous genres performed by the cutting-edge Brooklyn orchestral collective The Knights—praised by The Arts Fuse as “a group of instrumentalists whose collective musicianship is electrifying: full of just the right combination of wonder, play, and discovery.” Guest performers include Wu Man, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Magos Herrera, Krystle Warren, I’m ...
Boston Camerata: A Medieval Christmas, Hodie Christus Natus Est
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, mingling liturgical Latin with French, English, Italian, and Iberian vernaculars, these magnificent songs, hymns, and processionals show the multitude of ways in which the birth of Christ was celebrated in medieval times. The trio of female singers is accompanied by harp, fiddle, bells, and wind instruments. Together they touchingly evoke all the tenderness, ...
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, ...
