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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Daniel Müller-Schott: Four Visions of France
It is not by chance that luminous textures and sensual orchestral colors are considered essential features of French music. Its history features great names renowned for their art of instrumentation and sensitive use of timbres, who include the composers of the cello concertos on this recording: Camille Saint-Saëns, Édouard Lalo, and Arthur Honegger. Cellist Daniel Müller-Schott appealingly combines works from ...
A Poet’s Love – Timothy Ridout, Frank Dupree
In their debut recording for Harmonia Mundi, the young violist Timothy Ridout and his musical accomplice Frank Dupree celebrate the power of love. They perform selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, in Vadim Borisovsky’s popular arrangement, and their own transcription of Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe. The viola displays an astonishing range of emotions and expressive colors – from boisterous to tender ...
Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 2, Scherzos – Seong-Jin Cho
For his sixth Deutsche Grammophon album, pianist Seong-Jin Cho returns to the music of Frédéric Chopin with the Piano Concerto No. 2 and four Scherzos. The recording features these best-loved works in interpretations characterized by thoughtful poetry and youthful ardor. For the concerto, Seong-Jin Cho teams up with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, a conductor with whom he ...
Voces8: Infinity
Following a string of globally successful virtual festivals, the revered vocal group Voces8 releases a new album, Infinity, on Decca Classics. This collection of meditative and otherworldly choral recordings transcends genres and features six brand-new compositions interspersed with eight newly arranged covers from renowned composers. In this space-inspired concept album, Voces8 leads listeners on an introspective journey beyond our world, inviting ...
Yeol Eum Son: Kapustin
There are many great contemporary composers of our time, but few write music that we can relate to so easily and closely as Nikolai Kapustin. His exquisite use of techniques and musical languages of classical and jazz ensures that his music appeals to a wide range of listeners. The Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son has long been a champion of the ...
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1, Tragic Overture
With his First Concerto, the young Brahms set his own course in the wake of Beethoven and Schumann and at the same time poured forth his personal emotions in this work of impressive dimensions. Russian pianist, Alexander Melnikov, has chosen an instrument contemporary with the premiere, a magnificent Blüthner piano from 1859, a perfect match for the Basel Symphony Orchestra ...
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 ...
