Host Lisa Flynn curates the best new classical recordings to share with you each day of the week at 10:00 am. There’s always wonderful music discover on New Releases, from instrumental to vocal music, new recordings of old favorites, or albums featuring cutting-edge contemporary works. Discover more about each of Lisa’s daily selections below. Share how you feel about the new release of the day by commenting.
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Icelandic Works for the Stage: Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Rumon Gamba
Composer Páll Ísólfsson was the first director of the Reykjavík Music School. Like other musicians, he was forced by the lack of opportunity in Iceland to study abroad but, unlike others, he was able to return and work as the Organist at Reykjavík Cathedral to support his activities as a composer. His music for the Ibsen play The Feast at ...
Beauté Barbare: Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, François Lazarevitch
This album owes its title to Georg Philipp Telemann, who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing “in its true barbaric beauty.” The composer was fascinated: “An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.” François Lazarevitch, the founder and conductor of Les Musiciens ...
Sarah Beth Briggs: Variations
Variations by British pianist Sarah Beth Briggs traces a lineage of the genre through the Classical and Romantic eras, from Mozart and Beethoven to Mendelssohn and Brahms, and includes Beethoven’s mighty variations on the British national anthem, God Save the King, composed in 1803. Beethoven wrote in his diary that he wanted “to show the British what a treasure they ...
Maria Ioudenitch, Kenny Broberg: Songbird
The violinist Maria Ioudenitch joins with pianist Kenny Broberg for a lyrical program inspired – as the album’s name’s suggests – by song. It brings together music by 19th and 20th century composers from western Europe, Russia, and the United States. “I really gravitate towards the human singing voice,” explains Ioudenitch, “and find lots of inspiration for how I shape ...
Carlos Gomes: Opera Overtures & Preludes
Carlos Gomes was not only Brazil’s leading operatic composer, but he also helped pave the way for Italian verismo during the latter part of the 19th century. The preludes and overtures from his operas chart a course from early experimentation with orchestral sonority to a new conception of atmosphere and tension in his historically based dramas. In Alvorada (“Dawn”) from ...
Mozart: String Quintets K. 515 & K. 516 – Ébène Quartet, Antoine Tamestit
The Ebène Quartet welcomes a favorite colleague, viola player Antoine Tamestit, for two of Mozart’s six string quintets – No. 3 in C major, K. 515 and No. 4 in G minor, K. 516. Their last joint album, ‘Round Midnight, won a 2022 Gramophone Award for its thrilling exploration of diverse strands of 20th-century music. “When a fifth member joins ...
Beethoven: Violin Concerto – Veronika Eberle, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle
For her debut album, violinist Veronika Eberle revisits a work that has endured more than two centuries, and shares a fresh interpretation featuring new cadenzas by composer Jörg Widmann. Not only is Beethoven’s Violin Concerto a particular favorite of Eberle, it has been central to her career to date—most notably alongside Sir Simon Rattle, who has been her long-time supporter ...
Benjamin Grosvenor: Schumann & Brahms
The acclaimed British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor takes Robert Schumann’s haunting Kreisleriana as his starting point in his new album. This eight-movement work portrays the mercurial personality of the fictional Johannes Kreisler, created by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Grosvenor accompanies the work with the Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann by Schumann’s wife Clara. Further kaleidoscopic variety is provided by ...
Hopkinson Smith: Bright and Early
Lutenist Hopkinson Smith’s presents Bright & Early, a new album dedicated to the music of early 16th century composers Joan Ambrosio Dalza and Francesco Spinacino. Smith aims to capture the feeling of the “lone lute player who becomes a teller of tales through his instrument” in these reconstructed works by Dalza and Spinacino, utilizing a 6-course lute strung in the ...
Rachmaninoff: Études-Tableaux, Op. 33 & 39 – Nikolai Lugansky
Following his formidable complete recording of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, Nikolai Lugansky now immerses us in two more major cycles by the composer, the Études-tableaux. Like Chopin and Liszt, Rachmaninoff here transcends every technical difficulty to make room for emotion alone. At once poet and virtuoso, Nikolai Lugansky is unmatched in his ability to do justice to this prodigious musical kaleidoscope.
Mozart: The Symphonies, The Beginning and the End – Il Pomo d’Oro, Maxim Emelyanychev
Maxim Emelyanychev’s affinity with Mozart is well known, especially when it comes to piano works: in 2018, the conductor and keyboardist treated us to a recording that not only displayed his virtuosity and musicianship, but also revealed his remarkably close understanding of the composer’s music. Today, the symphonies are the focus of his first long-term project with the ensemble Il ...
Saint-Saëns: Violin Sonatas, Berceuse, Fantaisie – Cecilia Zilliacus, Christian Ihle Hadland, Stephen Fitzpatrick
Saint-Saëns’s chamber music broke new ground in France at a time when public taste tended to favor opera. His first sonata for violin and piano, one of the earliest composed in France, is a masterpiece of boundless beauty. Its emotional impact and its highly poetic content are served by the composer’s perfect mastery of formal architecture. The second sonata, composed ...
Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antartica, Symphony No. 9 – BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins
With Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica and Symphony No. 9, Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra bring their Vaughan Williams cycle to its magnificent conclusion. These two symphonies date from the composer’s later years, and, while initially misunderstood or underrated, both scores are teeming with creative vigor, startling orchestral color, and absolute mastery of symphonic thought, all qualities which ...
Jean Rondeau: Gradus ad Parnassum
Aspiring to Parnassus, the mythological mountain home of the Muses, Jean Rondeau explores the possibilities of the harpsichord in music composed over more than 400 years – much of it for the piano. He pays tribute to the Austrian composer Johann Joseph Fux, who in 1725 published the original Gradus ad Parnassum, an influential treatise on counterpoint, and to Muzio ...
Vivaldi & Locatelli – Chloe Chua, Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Rising star violinist Chloe Chua makes her recording debut on Pentatone together with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, presenting Vivaldi’s Four Seasons alongside Locatelli’s Harmonic Labyrinth. With the Four Seasons, Chua returns to a piece that’s very dear to her, and with which she won the joint-first prize at the 2018 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists. Despite her young ...
Rafał Blechacz: Chopin
“I feel that I have had some adventures with these pieces before recording them,” says Rafał Blechacz, whose latest album is a tribute to his compatriot Chopin. “I’m freer today regarding the use of tempo rubato, dynamic contrasts and emotional extremes, and maybe I’m braver with certain ideas. I didn’t want to wait any longer before going into the studio.” Blechacz’s devotion to ...
Compositrices: New Light on French Romantic Women Composers
Women composers had great difficulty in making their voices heard and gaining recognition during their lifetimes. Even today, they are all too rarely heard in the concert hall or the opera house. In this eight-CD set featuring several hundred performers, the Palazzetto Bru Zane label offers a response as far as nineteenth-century France is concerned. The selections range over chamber ...
Mahler: Symphony No. 5 – Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Payare
The Montreal Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Rafael Payare make their Pentatone debut with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The album is also the first recording under Payare’s tenure and the beginning of a longer recording relationship with the label. For Payare, the Fifth is the last symphony that shows Mahler still looking forward to what the future might bring, unlike ...
Schubert: Piano Sonatas D 537 & 959 – Garrick Ohlsson
Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretative and technical prowess. Although he has long been regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire. On this album, Ohlsson offers an inspired pairing of ...
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 – Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst
Written during the final months of World War II, Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 was described by the composer as “a symphony of the greatness of the human spirit, a song of praise of free and happy mankind.” The 1945 premiere, a runaway success, marked the highpoint of Prokofiev’s career in the Soviet Union. “Yet, there is a subtext,” says ...
