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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Chloe Hanslip & Danny Driver: Beethoven Violin Sonatas
Chloë Hanslip and Danny Driver have completed a Beethoven Violin Sonata cycle where each concert was both broadcast live by the BBC on Radio 3 and recorded for the Rubicon label. Beethoven’s ten violin sonatas represent the supreme challenge for a violin and piano duo, and the drama, visceral excitement and many intimate moments of these masterpieces is superbly captured ...
St John Cantius Choir: Our Lady of Fatima
St John Cantius Church of Chicago was founded by Polish immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. The parish today represents a broad cross-section of every ethnic, socio-economic and age group. Throughout the year, the church presents music events and concerts as well as offerings of sacred music for various masses and devotions. On this album, the St John ...
Carlo Graziani: Six Cello Sonatas
Carlo Graziani, born in the Italian city of Asti around 1710, was one of the earliest cello virtuosos. He played in London with the 7-year-old Mozart and left many sets of sonatas and several concertos for his instrument. He retired from the Prussian court in 1773, but he continued to work for Friedrich Wilhelm II on a generous pension. His sonatas ...
Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony & Other Works
Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony (the composer’s favorite of the nine he composed) makes a rare appearance in its 1920 first publication. Three lesser-known works complete the program – early settings of Rossetti and Shakespeare for female voices (Elizabeth Watts, Mary Bevan and Kitty Whately) and orchestra, and the late Variations for brass band. Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra understand ...
Anne Akiko Meyers: Fantasia
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers is one of today’s most in-demand classical performers. Beloved by audiences around the world, with a reputation for groundbreaking recital programs and important commissions, ‘Fantasia’ marks her 35th studio album and is one of her most important projects to date. Her latest album captures the rare combination of incredible virtuosity and poetic color with iconic works ...
Rolando Villazon & Ildar Abdrazakov: Duets
Two of the world’s top opera stars – Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón and Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov – are joined by dynamic young Canadian maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin, future music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for a thrilling choice of dramatic and comic duets. The program features music from great 19th-century Italian and French operas, including the ever-popular ...
The City Musick: The Topping Tooters of the Town
The City Musick was formed to explore the diverse repertoire of civic and court wind players in 16th and 17th century Europe and is now firmly established as the premier renaissance wind band in the United Kingdom. The London Waits were highly skilled and much valued musicians in Elizabethan and Jacobean society. They were the aural emblem of their city, and ...
Trios for Violin, Cello and Harp
Focused primarily on French music from the first half of the 20th century, this album reveals the subtle blend of sonorities formed by the harp, cello, and violin through the trios of Jacques Ibert and Henriette Renié. The exploration of this period continues with Danse des lutins, an acrobatic work for harp by Renié. Violinist Antoine Bareil and Cellist Stéphane Tétreault ...
Cedric Tiberghien: Music of Chopin
Cédric Tiberghien’s flourishing international career sees him performing across five continents in some of the world’s most prestigious halls. He has established a strong reputation with a wide-ranging recital, concerto and chamber repertoire. On this all-Chopin program, Tiberghien opens with the complete Op 28 Preludes, followed by one of the composer’s most beloved large-scale works, the Piano Sonata No 2. The ...
Saint-Saens: Works for Cello & Orchestra
Composed during a period of social readjustment in post-war France, the First Cello Concerto marked Saint-Saëns’ acceptance as a composer among the establishment, and has long been one of his most admired works. Recognition for the fiendishly technical Second Cello Concerto took longer, although its tranquil central movement contains one of the most sublime melodies Saint-Saëns ever wrote. Cellist Gabriel ...
Dover Quartet: Voices of Defiance
“The young American string quartet of the moment” (The New Yorker) delivers an original, deeply felt program of three European composers’ distinctive responses to the destruction and despair of World War II. Czech composer Viktor Ullmann’s powerful String Quartet No 3, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, draws inspiration from Debussy and Schoenberg. The ensemble’s muscular approach to ...
Euclid Quartets: American Quartets
Praised for their “knockout performance” by The Los Angeles Times, the Euclid Quartet has been recognized as one of the finest American quartets of its generation, known for dynamic performances filled with personality and vibrant color. Its diverse members hail originally from the United States, England, China and Venezuela. Their new recording contains the beloved American Quartet by Dvořák, and At the Octoroon Balls by ...
Saint-Saens: Organ Symphony & Carnival of the Animals
Saint-Saëns briefly paused work on his Third Symphony for a holiday in Austria, during which the whimsy of his Carnival of the Animals was born. Yet these two works – from the very same year of the composer’s life – could not be more different, and make a dramatic coupling showing two sides of a singular genius. Martha Argerich and ...
Rachel Podger & Brecon Baroque: Grandissima Gravita
Rachel Podger, called “the queen of the Baroque violin” by the Sunday Times, has established herself as a leading interpreter of the Baroque and Classical music periods. She is the founder and artistic director of the Brecon Baroque Festival and her ensemble Brecon Baroque. Their new album brings together four violinist-composers who are united by a reverence for Arcangelo Corelli. Works ...
Leif Ove Andsnes: Sibelius
Sibelius’ solo piano music – too long in the shadow of his symphonic writings – is the focus of Leif Ove Andsnes’ new recording. The album gathers together some of the Finnish composer’s lesser-known gems that Andsnes uncovered while going through Sibelius’ entire piano output. Andsnes says, “There has been such a feeling of discovery. Everyone was astonished that there ...
Daniil Trifonov: Chopin Evocations
Pianist Daniil Trifonov’s latest album captures the magic of Chopin’s music and traces its influence through the works of five other composers. On this double-disc set, Trifonov performs Chopin’s two piano concertos and a selection of some of his earliest and latest solo works, as well as tributes to Chopin by Grieg, Mompou, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Barber. The album features ...
Eden Stell Guitar Duo: Mompou’s Cançons i Danses
Mark Eden of the Eden Stell Guitar Duo writes: “Federico Mompou’s affinity for folkloric music demonstrates his love for an art with no artifice – one that can only be described as genuine, natural, sincere, and authentic.” Mompou wrote fifteen Cançons i Danses between 1921 and 1978, all for piano with the exception of the thirteenth for guitar and fifteenth ...
Cliburn Gold 2017: Yekwon Sunwoo
On June 10, 2017, the Fifteenth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition crowned its gold medalist in Fort Worth, Texas: Yekwon Sunwoo of South Korea. Established in 1962, the quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is often recognized as “the most prestigious classical music contest in the world” (The Chicago Tribune) and engages its global audience through fully produced live webcasts ...
Juan Diego Florez: Mozart Arias
Acclaimed across the globe for the beauty of his voice and the emotional power of his performances, Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez has in his career so far focused almost exclusively on the masterpieces of the bel canto repertoire by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, and others. Now, in his debut recording for Sony Classical, he turns his attention to the ...
Sit Fast: Seven Tears Upon Silence
When John Dowland composed the pieces that form the famous Lachrimae, or Seven Teares, he gave the instrumental repertoire one of its first masterpieces. The Sit Fast consort, lead by Atsushi Sakaï, presents a new reading of those timeless pages. Who says the viol should be earmarked for early music? The pure sonority of this instrument also inspired the English ...