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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Shostakovich: Under Stalin’s Shadow – Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons
Following upon their previous Grammy-winning releases on Deutsche Grammophon of Shostakovich’s Symphonies Nos. 5, 8, 9, and 10, this new set from Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra turns to two symphonies written in the shadow of World War II: Symphony No. 7, Leningrad, which represents the resistance of the Russian people to the Nazi siege of that city, ...
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique – Jean-François Heisser & Marie-Josèphe Jude
A composition that marked the birth of the modern symphony orchestra, it was instead through the medium of the piano that Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique became generally known to the public when Franz Liszt made a transcription of the work for solo keyboard. The project undertaken here by Jean-François Heisser and Marie-Josèphe Jude continues that respected tradition, but it doubles the stakes ...
Vivaldi Concertos – Accademia Bizantina, Ottavio Dantone
This double album is the third volume of concertos for strings and the complete concertos for viola d’amore by Antonio Vivaldi, performed by Accademia Bizantina and its director Ottavio Dantone. The Vivaldi Edition is an ambitious project begun at the beginning of the century to record some 450 works by Vivaldi, many of them unknown, found in the National University ...
Schubert: Unfinished – Concentus Musicus Vienna
The renowned Concentus Musicus Vienna, now led by the talented conductor Stefan Gottfried, presents a fascinating recording of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It offers a stylistically faithful reconstruction of Schubert’s beloved masterpiece. The third movement was completed by composer Nicola Samale and musicologist Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and an Entr’acte borrowed from Rosamunde is its remarkably satisfying finale. A selection of Schubert songs ...
Music of Tchaikovsky & Mussorgsky – London Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda
Widely recognized as one of the leading conductors of his generation, London Symphony Orchestra Principal Guest Conductor Gianandrea Noseda presents the first release in a new series exploring Tchaikovsky’s final three symphonies. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.4 is said to reflect his own turmoil: a disastrous marriage, struggles with his sexuality, and severe depression. Yet, despite the gloomy outlook, the symphony proves ...
Mozart: The Last Three Symphonies – Ensemble Appassionato
Naïve Records presents the debut album from conductor Mathieu Herzog and Ensemble Appassionato, an orchestra Herzog recently founded that is comprised of members from France’s major string quartets. Mozart’s last three symphonies, a triptych as monumental as it is mysterious, best symbolizes the fresh vision and repertoire of the ensemble. Herzog says, “Mozart’s music must be completely alive and continue ...
Leonore Piano Trio: Music of Hubert Parry
The Leonore Piano Trio brings together three internationally acclaimed artists whose performances as part of Ensemble 360 were met with such enthusiastic responses that they decided to form a piano trio in their own right. For their latest recording, the trio turns to chamber music of the English composer Hubert Parry (1848 – 1918), who is best known for the choral ...
Haydn: Piano Sonata – Kristian Bezuidenhout
A few years after a complete recording of Mozart’s solo piano works that has come to be regarded as a benchmark, Kristian Bezuidenhout turns his keen musical talents to Haydn, the other towering figure of the Viennese Classical keyboard repertory. The pianist described the project, saying, ”Preparing for this recording has been a vivid reminder that it is remarkably difficult ...
Bach: Orchestral Suites – American Bach Soloists
The American Bach Soloists are leading performers in the field of Baroque music. The San Francisco-based ensemble is dedicated to historically informed performances of Bach and his contemporaries. Their new recording contains the four Orchestral Suites of Bach, under the direction of renowned conductor Jeffrey Thomas. Bach’s suites are infused with the spirit of dance and also showcase the phenomenal ...
Gautier Capuçon: Cello Music of Schumann
Gautier Capuçon is a true 21st-century ambassador for the cello. Performing each season with many of the world’s foremost conductors and instrumentalists, he is acclaimed for his expressive musicianship, exuberant virtuosity, and for the deep sonority of his 1701 Matteo Goffriller cello. On this new album, Capuçon offers a program of music by Robert Schumann. In the Cello Concerto, his ...
Joyce DiDonato: Songplay
Joyce DiDonato’s new album, Songplay, unites world-class musicians from the varied worlds of opera, jazz, and tango in the pure pleasure of improvisation, experimentation, and exchange. The celebrated and critically acclaimed mezzo-soprano takes a creative turn on vocal music from the Baroque and Classical periods, coupled with imaginative interpretations of jazz ballads and selections from the Great American Songbook. The result is ...
Julien Martineau: Come Una Volta (Italian Mandolin Concertos)
A luminous, easily recognizable instrument, and a symbol of Italy’s musical traditions, the mandolin has been the subject of several major compositions throughout the history of music. First of all, the famous concertos by Vivaldi: two of them appear here on this new album by Julien Martineau. He also performs the poetic second concerto (in its first recording with orchestra) ...
The Music of Brazil: Alberto Nepomuceno
Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920) was a herald of Brazilian musical nationalism. He was one of the first composers in his country to employ elements of folklore in his compositions, he encouraged younger composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos, and his music was conducted by Richard Strauss. The Prelude to O Garatuja, an incomplete opera, is one of his best-known works and an ...
Ascent: Matthew Lipman & Henry Kramer
Dmitri Shostakovich’s long-lost Impromptu for Viola and Piano, Op. 33, recently unearthed in the Moscow State Archives, receives its world-premiere recording on Matthew Lipman’s Ascent, the acclaimed young American violist’s solo debut album, featuring, in the artist’s words, “music enraptured by flights of fantasy.” Recipient of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Lipman has created an album of uplifting and spiritually ...
Messa per Rossini – La Scala Chorus & Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly
2018 marked 150 years since Gioachino Rossini’s death in 1868. Messa per Rossini was composed in his memory by Verdi and 12 other notable Italian composers. Verdi himself composed the concluding Libera me, which he later used in his own Messa da Requiem. Conducted by Riccardo Chailly, this rare performance represents the work’s triumphant return to the spiritual home of ...
Haydn: Piano Sonatas, Volume 1 – Roman Rabinovich
This is the first volume in a series of new recordings in which pianist Roman Rabinovich will perform all of the piano sonatas written by Haydn. Haydn composed 62 keyboard sonatas. Written over a 40 year period or so, and displaying a variety of styles, the earlier sonatas were written for harpsichord and the last for the newly developed hammer-action ...
Britten: Choral Works – RIAS Chamber Choir, Justin Doyle
Having dazzled the critics some 16 years earlier with its label debut featuring best-loved 20th-century English works, the RIAS Chamber Choir revisits one of its favorite composers, Benjamin Britten – this time, under the direction of new chief conductor Justin Doyle. The program features the composer’s enchanting setting of poems written in honor of the patron saint of musicians by ...
Corelli: Concerti Grossi – Freiburg Baroque Orchestra
Violinist Gottfried von der Goltz leads the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, true hits of the Baroque repertoire. Enhancing the rich orchestral sound, the orchestra has added other instruments to the original strings: a large continuo (lute, harp, harpsichord, and organ) and wind instruments (oboes, bassoon, trombones, and trumpets). This is consistent with historical practice. Documents that have ...
Natasha Paremski: Music of Mussorgsky & Hersch
Pianist Natasha Paremski opens her new album with Mussorgsky’s most famous work, Pictures at an Exhibition. “This is a journey through ancient and mythic Russia, with a nod to the Franco-Russian love affair,” she writes in her liner notes for the album. “A work I have lived with the majority of my musical life, it never fails to surprise me in ...
Fiddler’s Blues: Philippe Graffin & Claire Désert
Philippe Graffin’s virtuosity combined with his skills as a sleuth have led to the world-premiere recording of a “Posthumous” solo violin sonata by Eugène Ysaÿe, an astonishing discovery that extends the Belgian composer’s canon of his essential six sonatas for the medium. Graffin unearthed the nearly-completed manuscript in the library of the Brussels Conservatory and completed the final movement in the most ...
