Jonathan Blumhofer
This is a terrific compendium of new music of the best sort: the kind that’s brilliantly written, expressively direct, played with assurance, and engineered with clarity and warmth.
Arvo Pärt’s ubiquity in concert halls and on disc for much of the last fifty years suggests that he’s got plenty to say to our cultural and historic moment.
Across his career, British conductor Martyn Brabbins has used his bully pulpit to bring to light all sorts of deserving, unfamiliar repertoire, including the music of compatriot Havergal Brian.
Baritone Will Liverman is emerging as a musician with a capital “M,” one whose thoroughgoing approach to the craft is singularly illuminating, inviting, and affecting.
That composer Anna Clyne is a gifted miniaturist is evident in “Abstractions”, a set of five movements offering musical commentary on the works of five contemporary visual artists.
This collection of ten items by the Soviet-era great manages to be more than a parade of mere curiosities.
This fine album demonstrates that the music of neglected, mixed-race English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is well worth resurrecting.
Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva’s recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Preludes & Fugues is a testament to that rarest of syntheses: a total identification of a musician with her repertoire. Pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Takács Quartet release an album that, on so many levels, is simply a joy.
What business has a period orchestra got playing the music of Anton Bruckner? And why can’t conductors and orchestras just leave Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” alone?
Arts Remembrance: In Memoriam, Christoph von Dohnányi (1929-2025)
Christoph von Dohnányi was a rare breed: a truly great artist whose mind never rested and whose standards never settled.
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