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.
Stay on top of New Releases with WFMT's curated Spotify and Apple Music playlists
Alison Balsom: Royal Fireworks
With an album of celebration, both joyful and solemn, trumpeter Alison Balsom again declares her love for the Baroque era, which she calls “the golden age of the trumpet.” Joining Handel’s exuberant Music for the Royal Fireworks are works by two other German-born composers – Bach and Telemann – and by the London-born Henry Purcell.
Beethoven: Complete Symphonies – Vienna Philharmonic, Andris Nelsons
Andris Nelsons has joined forces with the Vienna Philharmonic to record Beethoven’s nine symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon. The release marks the start of the label’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020. Beethoven has been central to Nelsons’ work since he began his career. The Latvian conductor garnered rave reviews for his 2013-14 Beethoven cycle with the ...
Brahms: The Final Piano Pieces – Stephen Hough
On this release from Hyperion, Stephen Hough performs a collection of exquisite Brahms miniatures dating from the final years of his life. The pianist refers to these works as brief meditations on last things before “the light fades and the final cigar is extinguished.”
Mendelssohn: Concertos for Violin and Piano
Violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv shares her passion for the music of Felix Mendelssohn in a radiant new recording of two rarely-heard gems: the Violin Concerto in D minor and the Violin and Piano Concerto. These are two striking examples of the precocious talent of the young Mendelssohn. Joining Ivakhiv for the double concerto is the award-winning pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi, and both ...
Ravel: Jeux de Miroirs
As if in a mirror, this recording juxtaposes the original piano versions of two of Ravel’s masterpieces (Le Tombeau de Couperin and Alborada del gracisoso) with their respective orchestrations. The Piano Concerto in G major combines the two facets, both when the piano is integrated into the overall sound and when it plays its role as a soloist. The subtle ...
Strangers in Paradise – Diana Tishchenko, Zoltán Fejérvári
This enticing album of sonatas by Ravel, Enescu, Ysaÿe, and Prokofiev emerged from violinist Diana Tishchenko’s victory at the 2018 Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition in Paris. Born in Ukraine, and trained in Kiev and Berlin, she has been noted by The Strad for her “power to mesmerize the audience with her large gesture and strong personality.” Her musical partnership with the Hungarian ...
Joseph Moog: Between Heaven and Hell
Joseph Moog’s ability to combine exquisite technical skill with a mature and intelligent musicality set him apart as a pianist of exceptional diversity. A champion of the well-known masterworks as well as a true advocate of rare and forgotten repertoire paired with his quality to compose and arrange, Moog was awarded the accolade of Gramophone Young Artist of the Year ...
Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 – BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
This program from the BBC Symphony Orchestra features compelling performances of two very different symphonies. The complex, visionary pantheism of Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral is an ideal foil for the unbridled ferocity of his Symphony No. 4. The album includes a special bonus – conductor Martyn Brabbins’s idiomatic realization of Saraband ‘Helen’ – heard here in it’s first recording.
Music of Bartók – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Dausgaard
The Onyx label presents a new series from condutctor Thomas Dausgaard and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that celebrates the scope and stylistic variety in Bartók’s compositional output. Whether inspired by impressionistic or late romantic music or folk music from Central Europe, Bartók’s music speaks to us with an irresistible vitality, passion, humor, and compelling seriousness. This is apparent no ...
Paul Wee: Music of Alkan
Charles-Valentin Alkan made his name as a pianist in 19th-century Paris and seemed poised for a glittering career. But following a series of setbacks, he withdrew into a life of relative seclusion, and as he receded from the public eye, so too did his music. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that Alkan’s works began to emerge from ...
Perspectives – Dawn Wohn, Esther Park
Violinist Dawn Wohn and pianist Esther Park present Perspectives, a new album featuring works from a vast variety of female composers. Wohn and Park have been making music together since their days as students in Juilliard’s Pre-College program. This exceptional album will almost certainly introduce listeners to some pieces they have never heard and expand the horizons for the great ...
Lucienne Renaudin Vary: Mademoiselle in New York
Trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary makes a musical transatlantic crossing with her second album for Warner Classics. Mademoiselle in New York highlights American and French composers and songwriters – Bernstein, Gershwin, Ravel, and Aznavour among them – featuring music from West Side Story, An American in Paris, and Candide. Vary is joined by the BBC Concert Orchestra and Tony Award-winning music ...
Mahler: Symphony No. 4 – Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
Mahler’s Fourth Symphony begins with a discourse on a simple violin tune and ends with a child’s view of heaven, delivered by a soprano. A hint of darkness comes in the second movement, where death’s fiddle leads a beguiling waltz; the ensuing Adagio is among the composer’s finest slow movements. Music Director Osmo Vänskä leads the Minnesota Orchestra through this ...
Bartók & Korngold: Piano Quintets
Youthful piano quintets from Korngold the arch-Romantic and Bartók in his pre-modernist vein make a fascinating comparison. This album by pianist Piers Lane and the Goldner String Quartet offers a snapshot of early 20th-century Austro-Hungarian chamber music as represented by two of its most individual voices.
Telemann: Frankfurt Sonatas – Gottfried von der Goltz
Gottfried von der Goltz, violinist and conductor of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, presents an album dedicated to the violin sonatas of a young – and already brilliant – Georg Philipp Telemann. Rarely recorded, these works show a surprising form as they allow the musician total freedom of expression and ornamentation. These features also demonstrate the unique creative inventiveness already in ...
Daniil Trifonov: Destination Rachmaninoff – Arrival
Following Departure, an album hailed by NPR as a “singular combination of swagger and stunning technique,” Daniil Trifonov completes his two-part Destination: Rachmaninoff journey with Arrival, a coupling of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Arrival also features Trifonov’s own transcriptions of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise and The Silver Sleigh ...
Vilde Frang: Paganini & Schubert
Violinist Vilde Frang, partnered by pianist Michail Lifits, has assembled a program that juxtaposes music by two violinist-composers of the early 19th century: Franz Schubert and Niccolò Paganini. While they lived vastly different lives and inhabited diverse aesthetic worlds, there are links to be found between them.
Haydn: Missa Cellensis
Haydn’s Missa Cellensis was written when the young composer was appointed Kapellmeister to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. The mass is a work of vast proportions, whose popularity is demonstrated by the many surviving copies. In this interpretation full of vivid contrasts, the RIAS Chamber Choir and the Berlin Academy of Ancient Music confirm their extraordinary ability to reveal every subtlety of ...
Gautier Capuçon & Yuja Wang
The fire, sensitivity, and unity of the musical relationship between two star players, cellist Gautier Capuçon and pianist Yuja Wang, is showcased in works by Chopin and Franck, recorded during the duo’s North American tour in Spring 2019. As the Toronto Star enthused: “A recital that showcased the very best in collaborative music-making.”
Simon Trpčeski: Tales from Russia
Simon Trpčeski presents a fascinating program of Russian classics featuring two unfamiliar versions for solo piano. The first is Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain. The second is Rimsky-Korsakov’s own fairy tale classic Scheherazade, arranged by Paul Gilson. The program opens with Prokofiev’s delightful Tales of the Old Gramdmother.
