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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Weber: Complete Works for Piano & Orchestra – Ronald Brautigam, Cologne Academy
Carl Maria von Weber wrote music that has been admired by composers as diverse as Schumann, Berlioz, Ravel, and Stravinsky. In his lifetime, Weber was also recognized as one of the finest pianists of the period, with an exceptional technique and a brilliant gift for improvisation. Like other composer-pianists, he wrote works to use as his personal calling cards, among ...
Bach: Trio Sonatas
This program contains compositions that have found their way into the Bach catalog. Nevertheless, each of them is an artistic reflection of other works by Bach or his work as a teacher. Against this background, the interpreters of this recording (flutists Ana Oltean and Kaspar Zehnder, harpsichordist Vital Julian Frey) have returned the sonatas BWV 1028 and 1029 to their ...
HK Gruber: Percussion Concertos – Colin Currie
Colin Currie presents the first concerto recording on his own label: a pair of works by the innovative composer HK Gruber, with conductors Juanjo Mena and John Storgårds and the BBC Philharmonic. To write one masterpiece for solo percussion and orchestra may be regarded as an adventure; to write two combines for a colossus. Such is the case for the ...
Chopin: Scherzos & Ballades – Abdel Rahman El Bacha
France-based Lebanese pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha offers a program that alternates between Chopin’s Scherzos and Ballades. Such juxtaposition in performance enables us to go beyond their perceived character (the more narrative tone of the ballades, the more transcendental virtuosity of the scherzos) and underlines their similarities.
Dvořák: Spirit of Bohemia – Fine Arts Quartet
Antonín Dvořák’s music, imbued with the spirit of Bohemia, reflects a love of his native land. His String Sextet, written in the distinctive style which brought him international fame, was an immediate success at its premiere. Composed just eight years earlier, his String Quartet No. 4, unpublished until 1968, features pioneering, wild outer movements, highly unusual for the time, which ...
The British Project: Walton’s Troilus & Cressida
Troilus and Cressida contains some of William Walton’s most seductive music, as can be heard in the new album from Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – their second for The British Project on Deutsche Grammophon. The recording comprises the four-movement Symphonic Suite reworked and arranged from the original operatic score by Christopher Palmer. “I dream about conducting ...
Il Cannone: Francesca Dego plays Paganini’s Violin
Paganini’s violin, the legendary Il Cannone, made by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù in 1743, is one of the most important instruments in the history of Western music. Paganini was the greatest virtuoso of his time, acclaimed throughout Europe and an inspiration to performers and composers alike. On his death, he bequeathed Il Cannone to his home city of Genoa, where ...
Lara Downes: Phenomenal Women
Inspired by her own mixed-race heritage and career-long engagement with diverse musical traditions, pianist Lara Downes creates and curates a new digital recording initiative, Rising Sun Music, that sheds a bright light on the music and stories of Black composers over the past 200 years. This collection celebrates Women’s History Month – the women who have gone first, have stood ...
Guerrero: Magnificat, Lamentations & Canciones – El León de Oro
El León de Oro is a vocal ensemble that began life in Spain with a small group of friends who were passionate about singing. Over the intervening years the group has established a solid international standing. On this recording, they perform music of Francisco Guerrero, who is still insufficiently well known by comparison to his great contemporary and compatriot Tomás ...
French Duets – Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis
Acclaimed British pianists Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne interpret gems from the French repertoire for piano duet. This bewitching album of music often associated with childhood includes favorites by Fauré, Ravel, and Debussy. Lewis and Osborne toured the program in the 2019/20 concert season. At the time Lewis noted, “Steven and I began playing duets about twenty years ago. It’s ...
Elgar: Violin Concerto, Violin Sonata – Renaud Capuçon
Elgar’s Violin Concerto – distinctively passionate and nostalgic – is one of the great late-Romantic concertos. “It is a huge piece,” says violinist Renaud Capuçon, “both in terms of its length and its romantic and noble nature.” This is Capuçon’s first recording with Sir Simon Rattle, here conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Paired with the concerto on this album is ...
New York Polyphony: And the sun darkened
Resonating across more than five centuries, expressions of personal piety and prayer fill these works by a quartet of Franco-Flemish composers, all born in the 15th century, and two modern-day colleagues, Cyrillus Kreek and Andrew Smith. For those familiar with the vocal ensemble New York Polyphony, this exploration of the intersection of ancient and modern music is far from surprising. ...
Lucienne Renaudin Vary: Piazzolla Stories
Trumpet player Lucienne Renaudin Vary pays homage to the music of Astor Piazzolla with an eclectic program of different ensembles: trumpet solo, with orchestra, with string quartet, and duets. Piazzolla is credited with adding new scope and sophistication to the tango in the 1950s and creating the genre of “nuevo tango.” Vary’s album also features works by a variety of ...
Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà: Immersion
Angèle Dubeau and the musicians of La Pietà offer Immersion, the first of three albums to be released this year by the violinist and her ensemble. A lifelong music lover, tireless in her research, Dubeau has spent hundreds of hours listening to music since March 2020. She found for her new album fourteen works “on which I lingered intuitively because I ...
Hilary Hahn: Paris
Hilary Hahn’s new recording pays homage to the rich cultural heritage of a city that has been close to her heart throughout her career. Paris sees the American violinist resume her productive partnership with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and its Music Director, Mikko Franck. The three-time Grammy Award-winner’s album presents the world premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Deux Sérénades, commissioned by Franck. It also includes Ernest Chausson’s ...
Jupiter and Jasper String Quartets
The Jupiter and Jasper String Quartets have released a collaborative album on Marquis Classics. This new release features the world premiere recording of Dan Visconti’s Eternal Breath (2011); Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat, Op. 20 (1825); and Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round (1996). Eternal Breath was commissioned by family members of the Jasper and Jupiter Quartets and targets the album’s underlying theme of ...
The Crossing: The Tower and the Garden
The Crossing is a Grammy-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new substantial works that explore and expand ways of writing for choir. Their latest album features Gregory Spears’ The Tower and the Garden, Joel Puckett’s I enter the earth, and Toivo ...
Nordic Rhapsody – Johan Dalene, Christian Ihle Hadland
Only 20 years old, Johan Dalene has already been hailed as “a musician of special sensibilities”(Gramophone). For his second album, the Swedish violinist has chosen repertoire close to home, with works by six Nordic composers. This is music that lies equally well under the hands of his partner, the Norwegian pianist Christian Ihle Hadland, and together the two offer a ...
French Music for the Stage – Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi
For their latest album, Neeme Järvi and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra present a delightful program of lesser-known stage music from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The overtures by Thomas, Auber, and Boieldieu were all composed for works staged at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, and are wonderful examples of the period. Le Roi s’amuse was written by Delibes in ...
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis – René Jacobs
Written between 1818 and 1823, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis was the result of intensive theological and musical research in the library of its dedicatee, Archduke Rudolph of Austria. It is, in Beethoven’s own view, his most ambitious composition. On this recording, René Jacobs shows us that it is also his loftiest. This is the work of a composer with deeply held ...
