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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David Deveau: Mozart, Beethoven & Harbison
Pianist David Deveau enjoys a distinguished career internationally. His first recording for Steinway, ‘Siegfried Idyll,’ was critically acclaimed in the New York Times and Gramophone, and was listed as one of the year’s ten best classical albums by the Boston Globe in 2015. On his latest album, Deveau and the Borromeo String Quartet join forces for chamber versions of concertos ...
Anna Fedorova: Four Fantasies
Anna Fedorova is one of the world’s premier young pianists. From an early age, she demonstrated an innate musical maturity and outstanding technical abilities. Her international concert career took off while she was only a child, and audiences around the world were stunned by the depth and power of her musical expression. On this album, Fedorova plays fantasies by four composers: Scriabin, Chopin, Schumann, ...
Nicole Cabell & Alyson Cambridge: Sisters in Song
Nicole Cabell and Alyson Cambridge, acclaimed sopranos and close friends, record together for the first time on an album of opera duets by Mozart, Offenbach, Humperdinck, and Delibes and specially commissioned duet arrangements of classical songs, folk tunes, and African-American spirituals. They’re accompanied on their Cedille debut by the Lake Forest Symphony under 2015 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award winner ...
Hélène Grimaud: Memory
Pianist Hélène Grimaud’s album ‘Memory’ explores the nature of recollection through a series of exquisite piano miniatures. The choice of repertoire embraces everything from impressionistic reveries by Chopin and Debussy to the timeless, folk-like melodies of Valentin Silvestrov. The French pianist’s recording addresses music’s unique ability to bring images of the past back to life in the present moment, to ...
Cello Works of Chopin & Schubert – Steven Isserlis, Dénes Várjan
Schubert and Chopin—two men of genius who had much in common: ultimately tragic figures who both died in their thirties; both miraculously inventive; both masters of smaller forms, through which they transformed musical genres—in Schubert’s case that of song, in Chopin’s that of piano music. Both composers possessed a gift for melody that has won them places deep in the ...
Antonio Pompa-Baldi: Napoli
Antonio Pompa-Baldi is an Italian pianist. He won the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 1999 and a silver medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He has recorded a tribute to the city of Naples with arrangements of Neapolitan songs by pianist and composer Roberto Piana. Piana writes, “For these ‘creative arrangements,’ it was hard to choose which ...
Music of Beethoven & Strauss – Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Manfred Honeck
Reference Recordings presents two iconic works in definitive interpretations from Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1. In his fascinating and scholarly notes, Maestro Honeck gives us great insight into the history of both pieces, and describes how he conducts and interprets each. He reminds us that the “Eroica” was ...
Thomas Hampson: Songs from Chicago
Thomas Hampson, America’s leading baritone and a champion of the art of classic song, makes his Cedille Records debut with a program of songs by five composers of the early 20th century associated with the city of Chicago: Ernst Bacon, Florence Price, John Alden Carpenter, Margaret Bonds, and Louis Campbell-Tipton. All of them, Hampson says, “have distinguished themselves in history ...
Víkingur Ólafsson: Music of Bach
Following his critically acclaimed recording of piano works by Philip Glass, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has released his second album, a collection of both well-known and rarely performed works by Johann Sebastian Bach. Renowned for his innovative music projects, Ólafsson offers listeners a very personal vision of Bach’s intricate keyboard music, artfully weaving Bach’s original works together with transcriptions by Busoni, ...
Cappella Amsterdam: Music of Josquin des Prez
The professional chamber choir Cappella Amsterdam was founded in 1970. Over the years, under the direction of Daniel Reuss, it has built up a repertoire ranging from early music to contemporary works, with a special focus on promoting Dutch music of today. With this recording, they launch a three-part series devoted to the Franco-Flemish masters of the Renaissance. The program ...
Ensemble Dialoghi: Quintets for Piano & Winds
Ensemble Dialoghi makes their Harmonia Mundi debut with this program of quintets for piano and winds. A work of ‘maturity,’ which the twenty-eight year-old Mozart considered ‘among his best,’ is paired with a ‘youthful effort’ penned by a twenty-six year-old Beethoven. Dating from an auspicious phase in each composer’s career, both pieces were met with an enthusiastic reception. Beethoven, it ...
Briggs Piano Trio: Music of Gál & Shostakovich
Continuing Avie’s acclaimed and influential series of recordings of the music of Austrian émigré Hans Gál, this latest release brings together two of today’s most eminent Gál interpreters, pianist Sarah Beth Briggs and cellist Kenneth Woods with violin virtuoso David Juritz for a recording of Gál’s breathtakingly lyrical Piano Trio in E major and his witty Variations on a Popular ...
Jean-Guihen Queyras: Vivaldi’s Cello Sonatas
Antonio Vivaldi’s six sonatas for cello and continuo were written between 1720 and 1730 and published in Paris in 1740. Although a staple of the cello repertoire, these works are not often played in public recitals. When they were composed, the cello was just emerging as a solo instrument, and Vivaldi took full advantage of the instrument’s expressive capabilities. These ...
Igor Frolov and Friends
Who is Igor Frolov, and who are his friends? One of Frolov’s best friends is violinist Piet Koornhof. Always on the lookout for unusual and appealing repertoire, Koornhof heard a recording of Frolov’s “Piece in Blues Style” and began his search for more music. Koornhof located many delightful pieces by Frolov, a Soviet composer and professor of violin at the ...
Harmonie du soir: Songs of Debussy
A century after his death on March 25, 1918, many Harmonia Mundi artists are eager to pay tribute to Claude Debussy, the magician of melody and timbre, the great ‘colorist’ and father of modern music. The key word is ‘mélodie’ in this generous joint song recital presented by soprano Sophie Karthäuser and baritone Stéphane Degout with pianists Eugene Asti and ...
Songs for Strings: Arrangements by Donald Fraser
In the 1990s, Donald Fraser scored a hit with his orchestral arrangement of Marin Marais’ Baroque classic The Bells of St. Genevieve, which remains a radio evergreen to this day. Numerous commissions for arrangements followed for musicians such as The King’s Singers, Yehudi Menuhin and the English Chamber Orchestra. Fraser returns to the art of arranging smaller scale, classic works by John Dowland, Henry Purcell, ...
Zhenni Li: Mélancholie
Zhenni Li’s riveting personality and passionate performances have brought audiences to their feet around the world. She has been hailed as a “magnetic pianist – with fire and poetry” by music critic David Dubal and for her “big, gorgeous tone and a mesmerizing touch” by The Philadelphia Inquirer. ‘Melancholie’ is Li’s recording debut, and features works by Schumann, Lourié, and Bartók. ...
Tesla Quartet: Music of Haydn, Ravel & Stravinsky
The great inventor and futurist Nikola Tesla, from whom the Tesla Quartet takes its name, talked of the invisible yet inseparable ties which bind people together. Through performance, teaching and outreach, the Tesla Quartet has for ten years strived to tap into this palpable feeling, using music to create meaningful connections with their audiences. Celebrating this first decade together, the ...
Music of Owain Park – Choir of Trinity College Cambridge
Owain Park was born in Bristol, England, in 1993. While at Cambridge University, he studied composition and orchestration with John Rutter. Park’s works are performed internationally by ensembles including the Tallis Scholars and the Aurora Orchestra. Rutter has written an introduction for a new recording of Park’s choral music performed by the Choir of Trinity College Cambridge. He says Park ...
The Classical Piano Concerto: Jan Ladislav Dussek
The Hyperion label presents another volume in a series devoted to rarely heard piano concertos of the Classical period. Howard Shelley’s earlier release of concertos by the Bohemian composer Jan Ladislav Dussek was described as ‘a real find’ (BBC Music Magazine). This successor is, if anything, even more impressive, culminating in one of the finest unknown piano concertos from the ...
