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
William Walton: Cello Concerto; Symphony No.1; Scapino
The Sinfonia of London conducted by John Wilson present their second volume of works by Sir William Walton featuring Jonathan Aasgaard as soloist in the Cello Concerto. Walton’s First Symphony was universally acclaimed as an outstanding success, with John Ireland commenting: “unlike any other English symphony, this is in the real line of symphonic tradition. It is simply colossal, grand, ...
Feminine Voices at Christmas
Ensemble Altera led by Christopher Lowrey presents their third release on Alpha, an album celebrating the female voice and the Christmas season. The program is a kaleidoscopic selection made up of sacred music (settings of the Magnificat and Ave Maria) and carols composed by women with works by Hildegard von Bingen, Imogen Holst, Germaine Tailleferre, Cecilia McDowall, Joanna Marsh, Barbara ...
Karina Canellakis conducts Tchaikovsky
Recorded live at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, this new release on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s proprietary label presents two of Tchaikovsky’s most profound symphonies: a revelatory account of the Fifth, with its shifting balance between fate and triumph, and a searingly personal reading of Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”). The Times praised the “explosive chemistry between this conductor and ...
Schreker: Die Gezeichneten; Korngold: Sinfonietta; Krenek: Potpourri
The three composers featured on this recording, remarkable for expressiveness and virtuosity, were all deeply rooted in fin-de-siècle Vienna. They were banned by the dictatorships of the 1930s, then blacklisted in the aftermath of the Second World War by the young European avant-garde. Only in recent years has the beauty of their works been newly appreciated. Vienna-born conductor Sascha Goetzel ...
Cuban Christmas
Following the success of the popular Mozart y Mambo project, Sarah Willis, horn-player of the Berliner Philharmonic, and The Sarahbanda release their first album on Deutsche Grammophon. Together they inject the colourful, contagious energy of Cuban music into a selection of timeless holiday classics. With their trademark genre-defying approach, the album includes works by Bach and Tchaikovsky – also re-imagined ...
A Cabinet of Curiosities: Music from the Marsh Lute Book
Gail Gillispie is one of the pioneers of Chicago’s burgeoning Early Music scene. She founded the Renaissance vocal ensemble The Scholars of Cambrai and has been a member of the Venere Lute Quartet, one of the nations few professional lute ensembles. She has also performed with the Hueglas Ensemble, American Medieval Players, and the Newberry Consort. In her first solo ...
The American Revolution: A Film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein & David Schmidt
The American Revolution is a new six-part, 12-hour documentary series that explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence. In production for more than nine years, the November release of the documentary on PBS is scheduled to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the start of the war, which began in the spring of 1775, more than ...
Joy to the World
The Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer presents their new Christmas collection. The repertoire blends tradition with innovation, combining Renaissance motets and fresh arrangements of classic carols with contemporary compositions, including works by Lowell Mason, Sarah Quartel, Michael Praetorius, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Cristóbal de Morales, Henry Gauntlett, John Jacob Niles, Steven Sametz, John Francis Wade, Franz Xaver Gruber, Richard Rodgers, ...
B.A.C.H.
Acclaimed Swedish clarinetist and conductor, Martin Fröst presents his new album dedicated to the music of J.S. Bach. Although Bach never encountered the clarinet, this has proved no barrier for Martin Fröst, who has returned to Bach’s music time and time again throughout his illustrious career. Fröst had already devised and performed programs entitled Beyond All Clarinet History (B.A.C.H.), which ...
Melencolia: Three String Quartets by Anthony Ritchie
Based in Auckland, the Jade String Quartet has maintained a strong presence in New Zealand’s chamber music scene, committed to commissioning, performing, and recording music by New Zealand composers, alongside masterworks from the string quartet repertoire. Their new album features three string quartets by Anthony Ritchie, for whom the string quartet is a preferred form to express his personal thoughts. ...
Piano Book 2
Lang Lang’s highly anticipated new album Piano Book 2 brings together iconic classical works, new contemporary pieces, and themes from film and TV scores, anime, and video games. It offers 32 miniature gems for all generations — spanning composers such as Bach, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff to Tony Ann, Yu-Peng Chen, Ludovico Einaudi, and Joe Hisaishi. Also including music from ...
Flourish (EP)
Black Moon Trio’s sophomore album is an immersive journey into the heart of the natural world, where the trio is joined by author/scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Together, they explore the relationships between humans and the environment in a program that weaves together music and spoken word. The album features ...
American Dream
The “American dream” is the thread that connects two works for two pianos and orchestra with a third piece for piano duo, presented by pianists Ludmilla Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle with the Victor Hugo Orchestra. Dana Suesse was born in Kansas City in 1909. She played her own compositions on the radio from the age of thirteen and composed hit ...
Anna Clyne: Abstractions
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) led by Marin Alsop present four orchestral works from the last two decades by Anna Clyne, the former Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mead Composer-in-Residence, including world premiere recordings of the title work Abstractions and Color Field. Alsop, a regular collaborator of Anna Clyne, commissioned both Abstractions (for the BSO) and Restless Oceans (for her Taki Concordia Orchestra); and ...
Butterworth & Holst
Following their acclaimed series of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra led by Andrew Manze presents a collection of works by two composers influenced by Vaughan Williams. George Butterworth left a small but enduring body of work. He was introduced to folk music by Vaughan Williams, but he was also a dancer and collector of folk ...
John Rutter: A Clare College Celebration
Led by Graham Ross, the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge celebrates the 80th birthday of legendary English composer and conductor Sir John Rutter with an album of choral works. The album includes pieces that Rutter wrote when he was a student himself at Clare College, then director of the Choir in the mid-1970s. Also included are pieces commissioned or gifted ...
The Well-“Tampered” Clavier, Book 1 arr. Post
Washington, D.C.–based pianists—composer-performer Sam Post and his friend and colleague Ralitza Patcheva—have join forces to reimagine Bach’s iconic Well-Tempered Clavier. Their new recording, The Well-“Tampered” Clavier, Book 1, embraces the expressive possibilities of the modern piano and infuses the music with rhythmic vitality drawn from jazz, ragtime, folk, world music, and twentieth-century classical styles. In the Baroque era, improvising, ornamenting, ...
Bennett & Duke: Violin Works
The two concertos presented here by Chloë Hanslip with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra led by Andrew Litton have been neglected for the same reason: their composers were much better known for their achievements in musical theater than their works for the concert hall. Robert Russell Bennett studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and his output includes seven symphonies. He ...
There I Long to Be
Ensemble Galilei is a small ensemble specializing in a wide range of music for their particular instrumentation, and includes Isaac Alderson (uilleann pipes, Irish flute, whistles, tenor saxophone), Jesse Langen (guitar), Kathryn Montoya (recorders, whistle, shawm), Jackie Moran (banjo, bodhrán, egg shaker), and founder Carolyn Surrick (viola da gamba). They celebrate their 35th anniversary with a double-album recorded over the ...
Telemann Violin Concertos, Overture, Suite, Fantasie
With more than 125 concertos to his credit, Telemann was one of the pioneers of this genre that had flowered in Italy. Combining daring, humor, and emotion, he particularly delighted in exploring the virtuosity of the violin, its gift for imitation and its lyricism. Alongside other works of his where the violin also takes center stage, Isabelle Faust and the ...
