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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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 ...
Generations – Théotime Langlois de Swarte, William Christie
Poised at the convergence of 18th-century French and Italian schools, Jean-Marie Leclair and Jean-Baptiste Senaillé were the French Paganinis of their day. Technically challenging yet full of poetry, rhythmically varied and always dance-like, their sonatas find two fervent advocates in violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and harpsichordist William Christie. Transcending generational differences, the “venerated elder statesman of early music” (Opera ...
Elena Casanova: Ensueños de Cuba
Elena Casanova has a special enthusiasm for the music of Cuba, where she was born, which has inspired her to perform and record the music of her roots. On Ensueños de Cuba (Daydreams of Cuba), she plays works by sixteen different composers, each displaying the distinctive rhythms of the island nation. Casanova says the album is a nostalgic musical travelogue ...
The British Project – City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra launched The British Project on Deutsche Grammophon last October with an e-album of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem. That was followed earlier this year by a second digital release, presenting the Symphonic Suite from Walton’s opera Troilus and Cressida in what The Times (London) described in its five-star review as an “ebullient, luscious, and splendid account.” The British Project is now appearing on CD, with the ...
Tchaikovsky Plus One, Volume 3 – Barry Douglas
For the third volume of his musical tribute to Russia, Barry Douglas has selected a range of love songs and dances by Tchaikovsky that span much of his composing life. From the early Romance, Op. 5 through to the two pieces from Op. 72, his last works for the piano, there is a uniform singing quality, each piece redolent with ...
Nicola Benedetti: Baroque
Grammy award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti’s new Baroque album is the first recording in which she plays on period set-up, including gut strings. Benedetti is joined by a leading group of freelance baroque musicians, forming the Benedetti Baroque Orchestra for the very first time. The album features a selection of concertos by Vivaldi plus Geminiani’s incredible arrangement of Corelli’s La Folia. Benedetti says, “This ...
Music of Vítězslava Kaprálová
Despite her tragically early death at the age of 25, Vítězslava Kaprálová left a portfolio of more than 50 works of the highest craftsmanship and inspiration. This selection of her orchestral music, recorded at the Kaprálová Festival in Michigan, includes the work that won her international esteem in 1938, the Military Sinfonietta. Abounding in youthful energy and brilliant colors, the ...
Haydn Symphonies, Vol. 10: The Times of Day – Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini
The Haydn 2032 edition celebrates the release of the tenth volume in the complete recording of Haydn’s symphonies. Entitled “The Times of Day,” the program is devoted to Symphonies Nos. 6, 7, and 8, whose individual names translate as Morning, Noon, and Evening. Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, who commissioned the works, is said to have wanted to show his guests ...
Lara Downes & Friends: New Day Begun
Rising Sun Music, pianist Lara Downes’ transformative series of monthly digital EPs featuring music by Black composers spanning nearly 200 years, releases the series’ first album-length recording, New Day Begun. With music by fifteen composers performed by Downes and special guests including violinist Regina Carter, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, and PUBLIQuartet, the album brings together newly recorded music with selections from ...
Emmanuel Pahud: Mozart & Flute in Paris
This double album brings together nine captivating works, all with their origins in Paris, which feature a solo flute. Emmanuel Pahud is joined by his colleagues from Les Vents Français – oboist François Leleux (here also conducting the Paris Chamber Orchestra), clarinetist Paul Meyer, bassoonist Gilbert Audin, and horn-player Radovan Vlatković – and by Belgian harpist Anneleen Lenaerts. “The pieces ...
Beethoven: Hammerklavier Sonata, Eroica Variations – Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returns to the Pentatone label with a recording of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Eroica Variations. The sonata is one of the pinnacles of Beethoven’s creative output, and arguably one of the highest mountains to climb for any pianist. To Aimard, it poses one of the most frightening tests of a performer’s life, but one that is as ...
Arthur Sullivan: Incidental Music – RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Andrew Penny
Sir Arthur Sullivan achieved worldwide fame as the composer who joined librettist W.S. Gilbert to create the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. However, his success with these “Savoy Operas” has overshadowed his other works, including a considerable amount of music for the theater that was wildly successful in its day. Sullivan’s suites of incidental music for Shakespeare are among his most ...
Robert Kyr: In Praise of Music – Antioch Chamber Ensemble, Joshua Copeland
Robert Kyr is one of the most prolific composers of his time, having written twelve symphonies, three chamber symphonies, concertos, and more than 100 works for vocal ensembles of all types. His choral music is distinguished by a warmly compelling lyricism, as well as by a contrapuntal mastery that arises from his love of early music, especially the work of ...
Sibelius: Orchestral Works – Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner
Following their acclaimed recordings of Schoenberg and Britten’s Peter Grimes, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic turn their attention to the music of Sibelius. Written in 1913 for the singer Aino Ackté, the tone poem Luonnotar draws on text from the Finnish national epic poem, the Kalevala. Its virtuosic demands are ably met here by award-wining soprano Lise Davidsen, who ...
William Byrd & John Bull: The Visionaries of Piano Music – Kit Armstrong
Pianist and composer Kit Armstrong steps back in time to revive the spirit of the early English composers William Byrd and John Bull in his Deutsche Grammophon debut recording. In the notes that accompany the double album, Armstrong discusses the composers’ immeasurable contribution to keyboard music, their contrasting means of expression, and his own approach to performing sixteenth-century repertoire on ...
