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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Louis Couperin: Harpsichord Suites – Christophe Rousset
The new Stradivari series from Harmonia Mundi allows listeners to explore the unique instruments lovingly preserved at the Philharmonie de Paris’s Museum of Music. Thanks to the skill and commitment of the museum’s conservators, these instruments are given a new life. On this release, the great Christophe Rousset plays a rare harpsichord crafted in 1652 by Ioannes Couchet. Through his ...
Nadine Sierra: There’s A Place For Us
Nadine Sierra, 2018 winner of the Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious Beverly Sills Artist Award, has made her first album for Deutsche Grammophon and Decca Gold, having signed an exclusive contract with the labels. “There’s A Place For Us” marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein. The album presents Sierra’s stunning voice in an eclectic choice of music – ...
A Far Cry: Visions and Variations
A Far Cry is a chamber orchestra based in Boston. With no conductor, and every single musician a full artistic partner, the result is a huge variety of programming, a high standard of excellence, and national and international recognition. “Visions and Variations” includes some of their signature pieces: Benjamin Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Ethan Wood’s arrangement ...
Yo-Yo Ma: Six Evolutions – Bach’s Cello Suites
Yo-Yo Ma’s new album “Six Evolutions” is his third and final recording of Bach’s Cello Suites. These works entered Ma’s life when he was four, when he learned the first measure of the Prelude to Suite No. 1 under his father’s instruction. Ma has never lost his initial fascination. “Bach’s Cello Suites have been my constant musical companions,” Ma writes ...
Brahms: A German Requiem – Yale Schola Cantorum
Johannes Brahms’s German Requiem is given a performance which reveals a quite different dimension to this monumental work. Iain Farrington’s arrangement—the orchestral forces distilled down to an instrumental octet inspired by the composer’s own piano reduction—is a perfect match for the glorious young voices of Yale Schola Cantorum. This chamber version highlights the sense of intimacy and personal expression inherent ...
Pavel Kolesnikov: Piano Music of Beethoven
London-based Pavel Kolesnikov was born into a Siberian family of scientists and studied both the piano and violin for ten years, before concentrating solely on the piano. He went on to study at the Moscow State Conservatory, London’s Royal College of Music, and at Brussels’ Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. Since becoming Prize Laureate of the Honens Prize for Piano in ...
Jeff Beal: House of Cards Symphony
This release grew out of the fascination of Robert von Bahr, founder and managing director of BIS Records, for the television series House of Cards. It wasn’t only the script or the acting that grabbed him, however, but just as much the music. Jeff Beal, the composer of the soundtrack, was contacted and it was soon decided that he should ...
Alla Zingarese: Civitas Ensemble & Gipsy Way Ensemble
The Civitas Ensemble, an enterprising chamber group founded by Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians, teams up with Czech violin virtuoso Pavel Šporcl and his wildly popular Gipsy Way Ensemble for a groundbreaking collaboration at the crossroads of Western classical and Romani musical traditions. Alla Zingarese (“in the Gypsy style”) embraces the past with new arrangements of well-loved, Gypsy-infused works by Brahms, Enescu, Hubay, ...
The Clarion Choir: Music of Alexander Kastalsky
In the face of the devastation wrought by the First World War, Alexander Kastalsky conceived a musical service of remembrance for the fallen. A pivotal figure in Russian musical life – he was a student of Tchaikovsky and acclaimed as the founder of a new, national church music – Kastalsky composed a choral-orchestral Requiem, for the concert stage. Simultaneously, he ...
Orfeo Amoroso: Music for Decacorde
The decacorde, or the 10-string guitar, is a rare variation of the classical guitar, relatively unknown even to many professional guitarists. The extra strings added to the usual 6-string instrument are no novelty but have a long history in many cultures. Thus, the evolution of this variation of the guitar shows influence from a number of different string instruments, the ...
Diderot String Quartet: Dissonance
The Diderot String Quartet – named after the eighteenth-century French philosopher and Boccherini enthusiast Denis Diderot – brings a fresh approach to works of the 18th and 19th centuries. The group came together in 2012 after having first met at Oberlin Conservatory and the Juilliard School. The four musicians share a background in historical performance and a passion for the ...
Seattle Symphony: Music of Berio, Boulez & Ravel
Each of the three compositions recorded here entails, among other things, an ingenious transformation of pre-existing musical material or styles. The eight-voice, Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth joins the Seattle Symphony and Music Director Ludovic Morlot in an exhilarating live performance of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. The program combines Berio’s groundbreaking work with Boulez’s Notations and Ravel’s La valse. Morlot says, ...
Kirill Gerstein: Music of Gershwin
In this album recorded live, pianist Kirill Gerstein explores the music of George Gershwin. Together with conductor David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony he plays the Concerto in F as well as the original jazz band version of the Rhapsody in Blue. The program also includes a selection of Gershwin songs in solo piano arrangements by the American pianist Earl ...
The Best of Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein unquestionably was one of the most astonishing and magnetic personalities in the world of music. He bestrode the musical scene in the second half of the 20th century like few others: composer, conductor, pianist, educator; but it was as a great communicator – of music and through music – that every facet of his life and legacy is ...
Ronn McFarlane: The Celtic Lute
For ‘The Celtic Lute,’ Ronn McFarlane turns to one of his earliest musical influences, and the music of his ancestors: folk music of Scotland and Ireland. He says, “I’ve had a great love of Celtic music since the 1970s, hearing groups like the Chieftains and The Bothy Band. I was delighted to find Scottish tunes in lute manuscripts from the ...
Bach: Dialogue Cantatas – Berlin Academy of Ancient Music
As the title implies, the soprano and the baritone soloists in Bach’s three Dialogue Cantatas are partners in conversation. The works, also designated as concertos, feature sacred dialogues between the soul and Christ presented in glorious musical settings that allow the vocalists to shine. This recording features soprano Sophie Karthäuser and bass Michael Volle, backed by the Berlin Academy of Ancient ...
David Quigley: Piano Nocturnes
Award-winning Irish pianist David Quigley, heralded by The Birmingham Post as a musician of “amazing maturity and concentration,” makes his Avie label debut with a stunning and beautiful recital that takes the listener on a moonlit journey of the solo piano nocturne. The album begins and ends with Quigley’s compatriot and the genre’s originator, John Field, and traverses the highways ...
Brahms: The Symphonies – Berlin Staatskapelle, Daniel Barenboim
The first orchestral recording from Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, ‘Brahms: The Symphonies’ is a four-CD set featuring Boulez’s beloved friend and colleague Daniel Barenboim conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle in all four symphonic masterpieces from the great Romantic composer. “Daniel Barenboim no longer needs to assert himself. To my mind, this is virtually an ideal prerequisite for interpreting Brahms’s symphonies, along ...
Ukrainian Rhapsody: Anna & Dmitri Shelest
This release from the Shelest Piano Duo presents pieces for piano solo and piano four hands by Ukrainian composers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Having established themselves as solo artists, while garnering prizes and awards along the way, the Ukrainian-born husband and wife Shelest Piano Duo brings to the performance stage inventive programs of not only solo repertoire, but ...
Beau Soir: French Music for Oboe and Piano
The Lumina Duo is comprised of oboist Merideth Hite Estevez and pianist Jani Parsons. Hite Estevez serves as director of Lumina Arts Incubator, an arts service organization in Wilmington, Delaware. Parsons is an active soloist and collaborator and a member of the keyboard faculty at Baylor University. They’ve gathered together a program of favorite music from French composers of the Impressionist era. ...
