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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Choral Scholars of University College Dublin: Be All Merry
The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin are an internationally acclaimed chamber choir of gifted student singers. Their holiday album features glorious arrangements of traditional Irish carols and a selection of new works written for this most versatile of choirs, some with effervescent accompaniment from the Irish Chamber Orchestra.
Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott: Songs of Comfort and Hope
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Kathryn Stott’s newest collaboration, Songs of Comfort and Hope, is inspired by the series of recorded-at-home musical offerings that Ma began sharing in the first days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United States. The album includes 21 new recordings, which span modern arrangements of traditional folk tunes, canonical pop songs, jazz standards, and mainstays from the western classical ...
Yuri Liberzon: Violin Sonatas by Bach
Born in Novosibirsk, Russia and raised in Israel, guitarist Yuri Liberzon has been recognized for his impressive technical ability and musicality. He performs three violin sonatas (BWV 1001, 1003, and 1005) by Johann Sebastian Bach, transcribed for guitar by Manuel Barrueco, with whom Liberzon studied at the Peabody Conservatory.
Beethoven: Violin Sonatas Nos. 7 & 10 – James Ehnes, Andrew Armstrong
The final volume in Grammy Award-winning violinist James Ehnes’ complete Beethoven Violin Sonata series with pianist Andrew Armstrong pairs the dramatic Sonata No. 7 of 1802 with the serene Sonata No. 10, composed in 1812 for the great violinist Pierre Rode. Over this series, Ehnes and Armstrong have demonstrated an almost telepathic connection and the full measure of Beethoven’s passionate ...
Schubert: The Power of Fate – Mathieu Gaudet
Mathieu Gaudet, concert pianist, full-time emergency physician, and father of three young children, presents Schubert: The Power of Fate, the third and most recent chapter of his ambitious project to record the complete sonatas and major piano works of Franz Schubert. The album opens with the Sonata No. 7 in E-flat major, D. 568, a work composed in 1817, when ...
Giuliani: Rossiniana – Goran Krivokapić
Mauro Giuliani was both a virtuoso performer on the guitar and one of the great figures in early 19th-century composition for the instrument. His works have entered the repertoires of generations of subsequent performers. The six dazzling Rossiniane for solo guitar are fantasies on themes taken from the great Italian composer’s operas. They offer a compendium of the guitar as ...
Khatia Buniatishvili: Labyrinth
Khatia Buniatishvili’s new recording for Sony Classical is a concept album as imaginative, sensitive, and philosophical as the pianist herself. “Labyrinth” explores the unfathomable quest that is human life. Recorded at La Grande Salle Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonie de Paris, the album draws on the evocative language of composers from Scarlatti to Morricone and from Bach to Glass.
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 – BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
Conductor Martyn Brabbins is a leading advocate of British composers. He continues a series of the complete symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, giving a richly detailed account of the peaceful Fifth Symphony. Many of the themes in the symphony stem from Vaughan Williams’ then-unfinished opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The album includes music from the stage ...
Charpentier: Mass for Four Choirs – Ensemble Correspondances
Paris, 1665: a young composer leaves the Saint-Michel district to embark on a journey to Rome. The journey promises to be a long one, its stopovers rich in encounters for Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Conductor Sébastien Daucé and Ensemble Correspondances invite us on an imaginary recreation of that voyage of initiation, from Cremona to Rome, by way of Venice and Bologna. A ...
Trio de l’Île: Piano Trios from Armenia and Argentina
The Canadian ensemble Trio de l’Île presents its debut recording with a mix of Argentinian and Armenian music. The album focuses on the fusion of different styles bringing forth colorful mosaics. On the one hand, Astor Piazzolla revolutionized the tango by blending it with jazz and classical music, giving light to Nuevo Tango. While Gayané Chebotaryan and Arno Babadjanian harmoniously ...
Tallis Scholars: Josquin Masses
With this ninth and final release in their Josquin Mass cycle, Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars come to three of his greatest works. Although all three Masses come roughly from his early middle age, together they form a perfect showcase for a genius who felt challenged to make each setting different. Phillips says, “If one were looking for a ...
United Strings of Europe: In Motion
Formed in 2012 by students at London’s Royal Academy of Music, United Strings of Europe brings together outstanding players from across the continent. The artistic director is Julian Azkoul, who leads from the violin, curates programs, and arranges music for the ensemble. For In Motion, Azkoul has arranged Boccherini’s atmospheric Night Music in the Streets of Madrid. Far removed both ...
Transatlantic – Callum Smart, Richard Uttley
Callum Smart returns to Orchid Classics with an album described by the violinist as “American and English music from past and present…cultures that I’ve lived in all my life.” Joined by pianist Richard Uttley, Smart plays music by Edward Elgar, who wrote that his Violin Sonata is “full of golden sounds,” and the Romance by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He also features ...
Cremona Quartet: Italian Postcards
Celebrating 20 years of an illustrious international career with their 14th recording and first on Avie, the multiple award-winning Cremona Quartet sends Italian Postcards, assembling evocations of the country by four non-natives. Mozart penned his first string quartet during his first Italian journey to the town of Lodi. Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade takes its inspiration from poetry and ancient Italian ...
American Music for Guitar and Piano
When they began playing together in 2017, guitarist Stefano Cardi and pianist Enrico Pieranunzi went in search of repertoire which would harmonize with their disparate musical backgrounds, that of a classical guitarist with a passion for jazz and blues, and a jazz pianist with a thorough grounding in the classics. They turned quickly to America, both north and south, and ...
Moszkowski: Orchestral Music, Volume 2 – Sinfonia Varsovia
The Polish composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) is best remembered for a handful of virtuoso piano pieces, but he also produced a substantial body of orchestral music, most of it unperformed for a century or more. The opening volume in this first-ever survey of his orchestral output presented the monumental symphonic poem Johanna d’Arc. On this latest release, two big-hearted Suites ...
Orchestral Music of Gershwin, Tower, Piston, and Harbison
This program represents American orchestral music in all of its verve and expressive variety. Following the sensational success of Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s Concerto in F was his first foray away from jazz bands into the concert hall, recorded here for the first time in a new critical edition by Timothy Freeze based on the composer’s own notation and performances. ...
Ars Nova Copenhagen: And
“And” is a collection of contemporary sacred music by Arvo Pärt, Julia Wolfe, and Caroline Shaw, interspersed with songs from the 13th-century collection Laudario di Cortona. Ars Nova Copenhagen was founded in 1979 and is widely recognized as one of the world’s finest vocal ensembles. The ensemble’s chief conductor and artistic director since 2003 is the acclaimed British conductor Paul ...
Ludwig van Beethoven: Late Piano Sonatas – Nikolai Lugansky
Édouard Herriot once said: “‘In Beethoven, everything comes from within.” This is particularly true of the late piano sonatas, which contain elements of both intimate journal and total experimentation before attaining the mystical serenity of the last sonata, Op. 111. Here is Nikolai Lugansky’s long-awaited vision of this pianistic Everest. The recording session took place from July 11 to 14, ...
Thomas Dunford & Théotime Langlois de Swarte: The Mad Lover
Frequent partners on the current Baroque music scene illuminate aspects of the 17th-century English notion of melancholy. The inconsolable “Mad Lover” of the album title is reimagined by violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte and lutenist Thomas Dunford as a character from the reign of Charles II: a tale told through music from the pen of such violin virtuosos as the ...
