Coming Soon,
Turandot from Antonio Pappano and other forthcoming highlights
Sondra Radvanovsky and Jonas Kaufmann head the star-studded cast in a new studio recording of Puccini's final opera with the Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia on Warner, with other spring highlights including the debut recording of Djibouti-born guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre, an all-American album from Yuja Wang (both on Deutsche Grammophon), and a brief history of the French ténor de grâce from Cyrille Dubois, Pierre Dumoussaud and the Orchestre National de Lille on Alpha.
Puccini: Turandot
Sondra Radvanovsky (Turandot), Jonas Kaufmann (Calaf), Ermonela Jaho (Liù), Michele Pertusi (Timur), Michael Spyres (Altoum); Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Antonio Pappano
Made in Rome last March, this is the first studio recording of Puccini's unfinished final opera to use Franco Alfano's completion as originally written - Toscanini, who conducted the work's premiere in 1926, insisted that the composer truncate his first draft by around 100 bars, which Pappano restores here in full. Reviewing the concert performance before the recording-sessions, Opera Magazine declared that 'Pappano brings out the dramaturgical sense of every moment of the score'.
Released 10th March.
Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The main event here is the world premiere of American composer and conductor Teddy Abrams's Piano Concerto: written for Wang in 2022 and originally conceived as a companion-piece to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, the 35-minute work pays homage to Gershwin, Broadway, gospel music and boogie-woogie. It's preceded here by a short work by Abrams's mentor Michael Tilson Thomas: You Come Here Often? (2016) was also composed specially for Wang, and was described by BachTrack as 'full of wit and charming jazzy inflexions' when she performed it as an encore at Carnegie Hall in 2019.
Released 10th March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto & Lalo: Symphonie espagnole
Ellinor D’Melon (violin), RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Jaime Martín
This is the debut recording of Cuban-Jamaican violinist Ellinor D’Melon, who took First Prize at the International Wieniawski Competition for Young Violinists in 2012 and at the Debut Berlin Competition in 2017; reviewing her live performance of Tchaikovsky with this orchestra and conductor in Dublin four years ago, The Irish Times described her as 'one of those rare players who gives the impression that her command – both technical and musical - is total'.
Released 31st March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Grimaud fell in love with the music of Valentin Silvestrov around twenty years ago, when ECM founder Manfred Eicher gave her a recording of this song-cycle as a birthday-present; last year she met the composer for the first time at the concert where this recording was made, at the Turbine Hall on the Stienitzsee. Composed in the mid-1970s, Silent Songs sets texts by poets including Pushkin, Lermontov, Shevchenko, and (in Russian translation) Keats and Shelley.
Released 3rd March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Ivo Antognini: Come to me in the silence of the night
Trinity College Choir Cambridge, Stephen Layton
This is the first full-length album to be devoted to the music of Swiss composer Ivo Antognini (b. 1963), whose career encompasses jazz and film/television work as well as sacred choral music. The title-work, written in 2019, sets a poem on loss and grief by Christina Rossetti, and was composed for The Aeolians of Oakwood University, Alabama; the programme also includes settings of O Magnum Mysterium and the Jublilate Deo, and the canticles written for Trinity College Choir in 2021.
Released 7th April.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Tamestit was one of the Quatuor Ebène's distinguished guests for Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht on their Gramophone Award-winning 'round Midnight in 2021, and now they team up again for Mozart's String Quintets Nos. 3 & 4, composed within a month of one another in the spring of 1787. Reviewing their performance of No. 3 at Wigmore Hall in 2013, BachTrack opined that 'its long arching phrases were captured brilliantly here by the Ebène Quartet and viola player Antoine Tamestit, who brought out not just the work’s luminous elements but also its darker, wistful undercurrents.'
Released 17th March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Hailed by Classical Guitar as 'a fantastically versatile and sensitive performer', the Djibouti-born, Paris-based guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre makes his Deutsche Grammophon debut with a programme of works by Bach and his French contemporaries Forqueray, Rameau, Royer and Duphly - the majority of the pieces here were originally composed for the harpsichord, and are presented here in transcriptions by Judicaël Perroy, Gerhard Reichenbach, Antoine Fougeray and Feuillâtre himself.
Released 31st March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
The French harpsichordist's sixth solo album for Erato is built around music by Johann Joseph Fux and Muzio Clementi, both of whom composed works entitled Gradus ad Parnassum ('Ascent to Parnassus'); as well as excerpts from both of these, it also includes Haydn's Piano Sonata No. 31, Mozart's Fantasia in D minor K397, two Beethoven preludes and 'Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum' from Debussy's Children's Corner, and is bookended by a pair of Ricercares by Palestrina.
Released 3rd March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Subtitled New Light on French Romantic Women Composers, this set presents music by twenty-one composers, from relatively well-known figures such as Hélène de Montgeroult, Louise Farrenc, Pauline Viardot and Mel Bonis to virtually unknown ones including Marthe Grumbach, Jeanne Danglas, Hedwige Chrétien and Madeleine Lemariey. The repertoire encompasses chamber music, orchestral works, piano pieces and songs.
Released 10th March.
Available Formats: 8 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Strauss: Four Last Songs
Rachel Willis-Sørensen (soprano), Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Andris Nelsons
The American soprano scored a palpable hit at Covent Garden a few years ago when she shared the role of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier with Renée Fleming, and the release of this all-Strauss recital (her second solo album on Sony) coincides with her role-debut as Arabella at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. As well as the Four Last Songs (which she performed at Buckingham Palace for the King's seventieth birthday in 2018), the programme includes the closing scene of Capriccio.
Released 10th March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Dubois unearths some real rarities over the course of this brilliantly-sung recital exploring the evolution of the French ténor de grâce from 1820 to the early twentieth century - his programme includes arias from Charles Silver's Myriane, Halévy's Les mousquetaires de la reine, Charles Luce-Varlet's L'élève de Presbourg, and Louis Clapisson's Gibby la cornemuse & Le code noir. And back on the beaten track, there's a knock-out account of Tonio's top-C-studded 'Ah, mes amis!' from Donizetti's La fille du régiment.
Released 10th March.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Cecilia McDowall: Da Vinci Requiem, Seventy degrees below zero
Kate Royal (soprano), Benjamin Hulett (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), City of London Sinfonia, Neil Ferris, Wimbledon Chora
Commissioned by Wimbledon Choral Society (who gave the piece its premiere in 2019), the Da Vinci Requiem sets text from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, the Missa Pro Defunctis and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Our Lady Of The Rocks By Leonardo Da Vinci. Seventy degrees below zero (scored for tenor soloist and chamber orchestra) was inspired by a visit to the Scott Polar Research Institute; the text, by poet and braodcaster Seán Street, draws on Robert Falcon Scott's journals and letters from his Antarctic expedition of 1910-1912.
Released 7th April.
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Recorded in concert at the Barbican at the beginning of 2020, this is the first instalment of a new Prokofiev cycle from Noseda and the LSO; individual symphonies will be released digitally over the next couple of years, with a physical box-set planned upon completion. Reviewing the live performance, BachTrack noted that 'Noseda and the LSO achieved a good balance here between accentuating the wit and edge, whilst maintaining “classical” precision and simplicity, avoiding simplistic pastiche.'
Released 3rd March.
Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
