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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Vision String Quartet: Spectrum
The new album “Spectrum” by the Vision String Quartet presents 13 songs composed, arranged, and produced by the four young musicians from Berlin themselves. Inspired by folk, pop, rock, funk, minimal, and singer-songwriter music, Jakob Encke (violin), Daniel Stoll (violin), Sander Stuart (viola), and Leonard Disselhorst (cello) have embarked on a journey to their very own sound and genre. The ...
Times of Transition: Cellos Concertos by C.P.E. Bach and Haydn
The three cello concertos on this disc illustrate that fertile period in the second half of the 18th century when features of the Baroque were gradually replaced by the so-called galant style. Foremost among the composers inaugurating this change was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose Concerto in A major is a perfect example of the passionate and dramatic range that ...
Merz Trio: Ink
Bright Shiny Things releases INK, an immersive exploration of Ravel’s iconic Piano Trio and the period in which it was written that marks the debut album from the award-winning Merz Trio – pianist Lee Dionne, violinist Brigid Coleridge, and cellist Julia Yang. In keeping with Merz Trio’s creative programming style, the album’s unique structure intersperses the four movements of Ravel’s trio ...
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons – Christian Li
At only 13 years old, the Australian-Chinese violinist Christian Li becomes the youngest artist ever to professionally record Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Li directs an ensemble comprising members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Born in Melbourne in 2007, Li began playing the violin at just five years old and came to international attention in 2018 when he became the youngest-ever winner ...
Brahms: Sonatas & Liebeslieder – Emmanuelle Bertrand, Pascal Amoyel
Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel celebrate their twenty years together as a cello and piano duet. It is hardly surprising that they chose to mark this anniversary with the music of Johannes Brahms, a composer who has been a constant on their journey together. Beyond his two ultra-romantic sonatas, Bertrand and Amoyel take the listener to an even deeper emotional ...
Chopin: Complete Nocturnes – Jan Lisiecki
It was through the Nocturnes that pianist Jan Lisiecki first discovered the music of Chopin – he recalls falling in love with Op. 9, No. 1 as a child and being enchanted by its yearning melody. The piece, the first of 21 Nocturnes the composer wrote between the late 1820s and 1847, offered a glimpse of a vast universe of ...
Sean Shibe: Camino
Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. Camino is Shibe’s first album on Pentatone, an introspective program exploring French-Spanish musical borders with works by Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Manuel de Falla, Antonio José, and Federico Mompou. Shibe has deliberately granted ...
Pacific MusicWorks: Stylus Phantasticus
Founded in 2007 by conductor Stephen Stubbs, Pacific MusicWorks presents Baroque music, dance, and theater to audiences worldwide, bringing experience gained performing with leading early music artists. On their latest album, the ensemble plays eleven works of early Baroque composers in the stylus phantasticus, or fantastic style. This colorful and emotionally-charged genre of instrumental music originated in Italy in the ...
Max Richter: Exiles
Prolific and pioneering composer Max Richter releases his work Exiles on a new album of the same name on Deutsche Grammophon. The title piece features alongside expansive re-imaginings of other works by Richter. Profoundly moved by the tragedy of the migrant crisis, Richter chose to channel his compassion into a piece for Nederlands Dans Theater. His ballet score Exiles grew from a ...
Peter Donohoe: Piano Music of Ferruccio Busoni
Peter Donohoe is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility, and commanding technique. He first came across the works of Ferruccio Busoni in the early 1980s and, as he states in his booklet note, “Busoni’s contribution to the musical history of the twentieth century is inestimable, and I feel very much enriched ...
Lully: Ballet Royal de la Naissance de Vénus – Les Talens Lyriques
Written at the request of Louis XIV in honor of his sister-in-law, Henrietta of England, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Le Ballet royal de la naissance de Vénus was performed in 1665 with Henrietta herself as the goddess of love and youth. This grandiose spectacle combining dancing, music, and poetry, served the power of the king, while attesting to the magnificence of his ...
Mozart: Piano Concertos, Volume 3 – Anne-Marie McDermott
The first two volumes of Anne-Marie McDermott’s Mozart piano concerto cycle with the Odense Symphony Orchestra have received a superb critical reception. Volume 3 of the series hears the American pianist in Mozart’s final piano concerto, K. 595, paired with Mozart’s sparkling, heartbreaking E-flat concerto, K. 449. The orchestra is led by the German conductor Sebastian Lang-Lessing.
Ruiz-Pipó: Works with Guitar, Volume 3 – Monasterium Guitar Quartet
Antonio Ruiz-Pipó was a versatile musician whose compositions display both Spanish and French influences as well as reflecting his own life story. This program reveals his inclination towards South American music, and in the duet Homenaje a Villa-Lobos and the quartet América, he looks towards the habanera and samba (as well as a little boogie-woogie). Ancient sounds from a faraway ...
Katherine Siochi: Nocturne
Katherine Siochi is an internationally acclaimed harp soloist and principal harpist of the Kansas City Symphony. She served as principal harpist of the Sarasota Orchestra from 2017-2019. Siochi is the 2016 gold medalist of the 10th USA International Harp Competition (USAIHC), one of the world’s most prestigious harp contests. Her new album, Nocturne, includes works by Alvars, Debussy, Chopin, and ...
Alice Sara Ott: Echoes of Life
For her tenth Deutsche Grammophon release, pianist Alice Sara Ott returns to the music of Frédéric Chopin. She approaches Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28, from a fresh perspective, finding a personal thread that parallels the music’s dramatic arc and wide-ranging moods. Ott frames the Preludes within a contemporary context by interspersing them with seven works by 20th- and 21st-century composers. ...
Karen Gomyo: A Piazzolla Trilogy
From the moment Karen Gomyo first heard the music of Astor Piazzolla at the age of fourteen, she was spellbound: “I had never heard such a combination of sensuality, fierceness, playfulness, sadness, and nostalgia.” As a violinist, she found the role of the violin in Piazzolla’s music especially inspiring, and soon started playing it herself – first in various group ...
Walter Piston: Concerto for Orchestra – Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose
The Boston Modern Orchestra Project is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Walter Piston’s authentically modernist style, infused with the wit and charm of his New England roots, shines through on this album. With a collection of works spanning four decades, the largest and earliest ...
Paul Wranitzky: Orchestral Works, Volume 2
Czech by birth, Paul Wranitzky settled in Vienna where he became highly respected as an orchestra leader and composer. Today overshadowed by his friends Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Wranitzky was the most important symphonist in Vienna in the late 1790s. On this album, the colorful overture to Der Schreiner (The Carpenter) is followed by three contrasting symphonies. The dramatic La ...
Raffi Besalyan: The Sound of Black and White
Sono Luminus releases The Sound of Black and White, a recording of solo piano works by Aram Khachaturian, Oscar Levant, and George Gershwin performed by Armenian-American pianist Raffi Besalyan. Praised by Fanfare Magazine as “a keyboard phenomenon” and American Record Guide as “a formidable pianist with a commanding presence and rich interpretive gifts,” Besalyan’s second album for the label includes ...
Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 21 – Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Wind Orchestra, Keith Brion
This current volume of Sousa’s music for wind band presents three exceptional examples of Sousa’s musical creativity. Chris and the Wonderful Lamp is an enchanting retelling of the Aladdin legend, while Showing Off Before Company is a clever routine Sousa often used to open matinee concerts. The painstaking reconstruction of Sisterhood of the States allows us to hear the ballet ...
