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
Roberto Prosseda: Piano Works of Charles Gounod
In celebration of the 200th birthday of French composer Charles Gounod, Roberto Prosseda has released a collection of rarely heard piano works by the composer who is mostly remembered for his work on the opera stage. Gounod was an amateur pianist in matters of technique, but he excelled at accompanying himself singing his own melodies. He composed about 40 piano ...
Teach Me Thy Statutes: Music of Pavel Chesnokov
Russian sacred music constitutes an entirely unique aspect of Russian and world musical culture. Among the composers whose musical legacy has become an integral part of the Russian Orthodox Church’s liturgical life is Pavel Chesnokov (1877-1944). He belongs to the so-called “new direction” of Moscow composers, a school of church composition that arose in the late 19th-early 20th centuries within ...
Neave Trio: French Moments
The young Neave Trio explores some of the most prominent French composers of the early 20th century in their new album. The dominant piece here is the lesser-known trio by Albert Roussel: only the second of his completed works to be published. This is followed by Debussy’s early piano trio, performed with a bright and radiant approach that provides great moments of ...
Casals Quartet: Beethoven’s Complete String Quartets, Volume 1
Launching its complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, the Casals Quartet presents this first installment featuring initial examples of the genre from each of the three key periods in the composer’s career: his formative years, the so-called ‘heroic’ middle period, and that of his artistic maturity. The ingenious juxtaposition shows how much his superhuman quest for perfection enriched a compositional ...
Brasil Guitar Duo: Concertos of Brouwer & Bellinati
These two concertos show the increasing importance of the guitar duo on the world’s concert stages. Leo Brouwer, one of the foremost Latin American composers, has written many admired guitar concertos, but The Book of Signs is his first for two guitars, a double concerto of great virtuosity, with a majestic, songful theme in its central movement. A crucial figure ...
Boston Baroque: Biber’s Mystery Sonatas
Heinrich Biber’s astonishingly powerful and deeply emotional Mystery Sonatas represent a triumph of Baroque invention. The adventurous use of six baroque violins in fifteen different tunings creates otherworldly soundscapes that result in a deeply moving and glorious listening experience. This highly disorientating practice reaches its pinnacle in Sonata XI (The Resurrection) where the middle two strings are crossed over each ...
Eleonor Bindman & Jenny Lin: The Brandenburg Duets
Eleonor Bindman’s new transcription of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos highlights their polyphony, imagining how Bach might have distributed the score if he had created four-part inventions for piano duet. With an equal partnership between the two instrumentalists, using the modern piano’s full potential to convey the unique scoring and character of each work, the concertos are ordered to create an engaging ...
Orchestral Works of Debussy – Philharmonia Orchestra, Pablo Heras-Casado
A century after his death in 1918, many artists are eager to pay tribute to Claude Debussy, the magician of melody and timbre, the great ‘colorist’ and father of modern music. Alongside two shimmering masterpieces, La Mer and the celebrated Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the Symphonic Fragments from Le Martyre de saint Sébastien receive loving attention from the distinguished musicians of the Philharmonia Orchestra, ...
The Brook Street Band: Handel’s Violin Sonatas
The Brook Street Band’s enthusiasm for the music of George Frideric Handel shines through on this recording of the nine Violin Sonatas by, or attributed to, the Baroque composer. The ensemble’s tenth release for Avie compliments its critically acclaimed and award-winning discography of a wide variety of Handel’s chamber music and vocal works. “These performances have a powerful stamp of ...
Joshua Bell Plays Bruch
Max Bruch’s two violin masterpieces have inspired the new album from Grammy Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell. Bell performs and directs the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in his first-ever recording of the Scottish Fantasy and offers a fresh take on Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26 – the first concerto Bell recorded thirty years ...
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer
Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in 1842, on a commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia. The king was inspired by a presentation of Sophocles’s Antigone which featured music by Mendelssohn, and was the first of several commissions for the composer to write music to accompany the king’s favorite plays. It’s interesting to note ...
The Romantic Piano Concerto, Volume 76: Music of Rheinberger & Scholz
On Volume 76 of Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series, pianist Simon Callaghan and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra led by Ben Gernon perform works by Joseph Rheinberger and Bernhard Scholz unlikely to be encountered in the concert hall. Both composers led successful careers reflected in music more substantial than entertaining. The high expectations of this series are amply realized by ...
American Romantics, Volume III
“American Romantics III” is the third volume in a project initiated by conductor Reuben Blundell after discovering several scores of previously unrecorded works by 19th century American composers through the Fleischer Collection. Blundell leads the Philadelphia-area Lansdowne Symphony Orchestra on this recording of premieres, some of which draw on American melodies while others reflect the prevailing Central European compositional style of ...
Seunghee Lee & Katrine Gislinge: Full Circle
Clarinetist Seunghee Lee is a multi-faceted artist who has worked to the expand the repertoire for the instrument. Her latest recording is a collaboration with pianist Katrine Gislinge. The program of “Full Circle” mixes Romantic pieces and contemporary fare for clarinet, including three world premieres (one a transcription she has edited for Carl Fischer of Lukas Foss’s Three American Pieces).
Ray Chen: The Golden Age
Deemed one of today’s most charismatic and compelling young violinists, Ray Chen presents The Golden Age – a collection of chamber and orchestral works and his first recording on Decca Classics since signing to the label. Chen handpicked a selection of works, all of which celebrate the “golden age” of the violin. The centerpiece is Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, ...
Jonathan Plowright: Piano Music of Josef Suk
The early works of Josef Suk channel something of the same life-affirming Czech spirit also characteristic of Dvořák, his teacher and father-in-law. Pianist Jonathan Plowright makes a persuasive case for a composer whose music is at last emerging from the shadows. The four groups of pieces on this recording come from the first half of the 1890s and 1902. Along with ...
Mozart: Complete Music for Flute & Orchestra – Rune Most
The Bridge label’s new double album of Mozart’s complete music for flute and orchestra features the Odense Symphony Orchestra and their principal flutist Rune Most, performing on a wooden flute. The recording, made in the acoustically superb Carl Nielsen Hall, includes the two Flute Concertos, the Rondo in C, and the Concerto for Flute and Harp. Rune Most began his ...
Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra: Music of Turnage & Berlioz
Recorded live in Vienna’s Musikverein in October 2017, this album captures a special evening which saw a new concerto for two violins and orchestra, Shadow Walker by Mark Anthony Turnage, performed by Vadim Repin and Daniel Hope with the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic under Sascha Goetzel. The second half of the concert was an electrifying performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
Les Siècles: Music of Maurice Ravel
After their revelatory recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Les Siècles and François-Xavier Roth give us the exotic Mother Goose Suite and Le tombeau de Couperin, which sound so new thanks to this period-instrument setting (light on vibrato, and with instruments appropriate to the time of composition). Ma Mére l’Oye, with its unique colors, benefits most from this approach, less sweet than ...
Schumann: Complete Works for Cello – Gabriel Schwabe
Schumann’s love of the cello, which developed when he learned the instrument as a young man, is expressed most fully in his Cello Concerto in A minor. It is a work marked by freshness of spirit and singing lyricism and stands as a rich example of mid-19th-century Romanticism. His small character pieces reveal Schumann’s joy in the cello’s unique lyrical ...