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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The Romantic Piano Concerto, Volume 81 – Music of Rubbra & Bliss
The latest installment in the Romantic Piano Concerto series from Hyperion presents two very different takes on the form, both equally successful. The concerto by Arthur Bliss—written in 1939 for the World’s Fair in New York—is extroverted, exuberant, and virtuosic. While the work by Edmund Rubbra is a profound reflection on, and continuation of, the English pastoral tradition. Pianist Piers ...
Four Seasons: Vivaldi & Piazzolla – Arabella Steinbacher
Star violinist Arabella Steinbacher presents Antonio Vivaldi’s world-famous Four Seasons alongside Astor Piazzolla’s Four Seasons in Buenos Aires, creating a lively combination of Baroque and tango. The enormous popularity of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons tends to make us forget the original and ground-breaking nature of these violin concertos. Coupling them with Piazzolla’s tango-inspired Four Seasons of Buenos Aires makes both pieces ...
Camille Thomas: Voice of Hope
Voice of Hope is Camille Thomas’s second album for Deutsche Grammophon. The Franco-Belgian cellist’s program pays tribute to people’s ability to triumph over adversity, create harmony in place of chaos, and overcome hatred with love. The album presents the world-premiere recording of Fazil Say’s concerto Never Give Up, a response to terrorist attacks in Paris and Istanbul written for and ...
Music of William Dawson & Ulysses Kay
William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934 to huge enthusiasm. Its traditional form houses a continuous process of variation and introduces little-known spirituals in fragmentary form, while the work’s recurring motifs, remarkable transitions, and syncopations are enhanced in Dawson’s 1952 revision heard here. The Fantasy Variations by Ulysses Kay employs dissonance ...
Johannes de Cleve: Missa Rex Babylonis & Other Works
Comprising five professional singers from five European countries, Cinquecento takes its name from the Italian term for the 16th century. The pan-European structure of the ensemble harks back to the imperial chapel choirs of the time, whose members would have been chosen for their musicianship from Europe’s most prized musical establishments. Their ongoing exploration of Franco-Flemish repertoire from the 16th ...
Sarah Beth Briggs: The Austrian Connection
Much lauded for her interpretations of Hans Gál’s piano concerto and chamber music works, pianist Sarah Beth Briggs presents the composer’s beguiling Three Preludes alongside well-loved works by three of his greatest Austrian forebears – Haydn, Mozart and Schubert. Following meticulous examination of the original scores, Briggs sensitively translates the authentic character of each work to the resources of a ...
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 ...
