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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Lisa Batiashvili: City Lights
In her latest project, City Lights, violinist Lisa Batiashvili brings together memories of important places in her life with some of the world’s most beautiful music. This musical journey from her native Georgia to Paris, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Hollywood features collaborations with artists such as Miloš, Katie Melua, and Till Brönner. City Lights brings together Hollywood legend Charlie Chaplin’s ...
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 & Choral Fantasy
This double album enshrines the exemplary work of an ensemble whose designation “Baroque Orchestra” by no means limits its excursions into later music. Under the direction of conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and Zürcher Sing-Akademie offer a profoundly renewed vision of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the direct descendant of the much earlier “Choral Fantasy.” The latter work showcased one of ...
Silhouettes – Dana Zemtsov, Anna Fedorova
Winner of numerous competitions, Dana Zemtsov is one of the most promising international viola soloists of her generation. Pianist Anna Fedorova demonstrated an innate musical maturity and outstanding technical abilities from an early age. Her international concert career took off while she was only a child. On their new collaboration, “Silhouettes,” Zemtsov and Fedorova perform compositions written by French and ...
Tchaikovsky & Leshnoff – Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Manfred Honeck
Reference Recordings presents Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in a powerful interpretation from Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. According to Honeck’s notes that accompany the music, he and the musicians explore the tension and contrasts between “darkness and suffering, but also hope and light. At once, it is on the edge of despair—depressed, hopeless, broken, melancholic, and gloomy; but ...
Hee-Young Lim: Russian Cello Sonatas
For her latest album on Sony Classical, cellist Hee-Young Lim has chosen works born out of tumultuous times in the lives of two Russian contemporaries: Sergei Rachmaninoff and Sergei Prokofiev. On this recording of sonatas, she is joined by pianist Nathalia Milstein. Lim remembers being profoundly influenced after hearing works by the great Russian masters as a child. It unleashed ...
Mahan Esfahani – Musique?
Mahan Esfahani has made it his life’s work to bring the harpsichord to the concert mainstream, and to that end his creative programming and work in commissioning new music have drawn the attention of critics and audiences alike. On his latest album, the harpsichord is transmogrified into an elemental force, by turns supported or menaced by an astonishing arsenal of ...
The Beethoven Connection, Volume 1 – Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
In the 250th Beethoven anniversary year, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has chosen this program of works by contemporary composers to illuminate and contextualize Beethoven’s extraordinary output for piano. In his explanatory note for the album, the pianist writes: “Just as a mountain peak is always surrounded by other perhaps less lofty but no less fascinating summits, the major works of Beethoven are ...
Beethoven: Triple Concerto – Anne-Sophie Mutter, Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim
Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Daniel Barenboim, three of today’s most renowned classical artists and Beethoven interpreters, celebrate the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth with a recording of the Triple Concerto coupled with the Seventh Symphony. The recordings were made at concerts held in Buenos Aires and Berlin – in July and October 2019 respectively – to ...
Mahler: Symphony No. 7 – Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
In an effort to arrange the first performance of his Seventh Symphony, Gustav Mahler declared it to be his best work, “preponderantly cheerful in character.” Nevertheless, it remains the least performed symphony of the entire cycle, and has come to be regarded as enigmatic and less successful than its siblings. Mahler famously said that “a symphony must be like the ...
Grigory Sokolov: Beethoven, Brahms
In recent decades, Grigory Sokolov has elected to perform solo recitals only, eschewing concertos and probably frustrating some of his many admirers. The great Russian pianist, who rose to fame after winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1966, aged only sixteen, also restricts his activities to central Europe because he dislikes long flights and jet lag. He stayed ...
Les Vents Français: Romantique
We tend not to think of the 19th century as a golden age for wind instruments. While the individual instruments themselves enjoyed varying fortunes, their standing was much less significant than that of string instruments or the piano. However, the situation improved for all of them with the onset of Romanticism and a remarkable new repertoire for ensembles of differing ...
Choir of Westminster Abbey: Music of Parry, Stanford, Gray, Wood
The Choir of Westminster Abbey is renowned worldwide as one of the finest choirs of its type. Comprising up to thirty boys (all of whom attend the Abbey’s unique Choir School) and twelve professional adult singers, known as Lay Vicars, its wide-ranging performing activities are rooted in centuries-old tradition and its repertoire ranges from plainsong and Tudor polyphony to twentieth-century ...
Inbal Segev: Elgar, Clyne
This formidable release features Inbal Segev performing Elgar’s emotive Cello Concerto coupled with DANCE, an inspiring new work by Grammy-nominated English composer Anna Clyne that was commissioned by Segev. Marin Alsop conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Alsop introduced the cellist to Clyne, sparking a special synergy between the three women. Segev expounds, “Anna’s music has an old-soul sensibility but is fresh and modern at the same ...
Beethoven & Grieg – Mito Chamber Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, Martha Argerich
Decca Classics presents the second official joint recording from Seiji Ozawa and Martha Argerich, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.2, and Ozawa’s first-ever recording of Grieg’s Holberg Suite. Recorded live in concert in Japan in May 2019, it includes a bonus track from Mozart’s Divertimento, K. 136. Argerich and Ozawa first performed together over 40 years ago, when Argerich made her ...
Sharon Isbin: Affinity
On her latest release, multiple Grammy winner Sharon Isbin performs multi-faceted and virtuosic new works for guitar, written for her by four leading composers. From the Africa-influenced El Decameron Negro by iconic Cuban guitarist/composer Leo Brouwer, through the Chinese and Spanish-inspired Seven Desires by Tan Dun, to Richard Danielpour’s sensual song cycle Of Love and Longing, and the jazz and world music-influenced Affinity by Chris Brubeck, Sharon Isbin gives her ...
Les Barricades – Thomas Dunford, Jean Rondeau
Harpsichordist Jean Rondeau is joined by Thomas Dunford on lute to explore the music from the court at Versailles during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. The album also features mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, baritone Marc Maullion, and Myriam Rignol on viola da gamba. Rondeau says, “Both of us have grown up with this music from the cradle of ...
Elgar: Violin Concerto – Nicola Benedetti
Elgar’s Violin Concerto is considered to be one of the most technically demanding violin concertos and is a marathon for the soloist at just under an hour in length. Nicola Benedetti performs this masterpiece with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. Pianist Petr Liminov joins Benedetti for three short works by Elgar for violin and piano: Sospiri, Salut ...
Elgar & Beach: Piano Quintets – Takács Quartet, Garrick Ohlsson
Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet of 1907 proved a deservedly popular success in its early years. Critics found it “truly modern” and “distinctly rhapsodic…in the fashion of our time.” On this recording from the Takács Quartet and pianist Garrick Ohlsson, it makes a compelling, and surprising, match for Elgar’s own Piano Quintet. A late work by the composer, written around the ...
Seong-Jin Cho: The Wanderer
The Romantic theme of the wanderer, a free spirit undertaking a journey into the self, runs through Seong-Jin Cho’s latest solo album. The globetrotting Korean pianist’s program includes two monuments of the 19th-century repertoire – Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy and Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor. The album also contains Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1, a single-movement work of extraordinary ...
Richard Rodney Bennett: Orchestral Works, Volume 4
In this fourth volume in their Richard Rodney Bennett series, John Wilson and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra turn to his Piano Concerto of 1968. The soloist here, Michael McHale, gives a virtuosic performance. Commissioned in 1982 for the sixtieth anniversary of the BBC, Anniversaries is the other major work on this recording. A brilliantly virtuosic concerto for orchestra, the ...
