Jonathan Blumhofer
A winning reminder of Sir Neville Marriner’s impressive stylistic range as a conductor, a fine recording of a much-loved and -played Richard Strauss tone poem, and a striking, powerful presentation of the string quartets of James MacMillan.
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Aspects of America, from the Oregon Symphony and its music director Carlos Kalmar, is at once superbly played, astutely programmed, and aesthetically necessary.
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Jonathan Nott does right by Ligeti and Herbert Blomstedt does the same for Mozart. You didn’t know that Evgeny Kissin, the piano virtuoso, was also a composer? Join the club.
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A triumphant disc from A Far Cry, some fresh thinking from Giuseppe Sinopoli and the Israel Philharmonic, and Thomas Hampson, a great purveyor of American song, focuses on Chicago.
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Four new albums: the standouts include the finest Andris Nelsons/BSO Shostakovich collaboration to date and the Neave Trio’s wonderful new French Moments.
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Conductor Aapo Häkkinen explores Robert Schumann’s writing for chorus;Andrew Manze caps off his three-volume Mendelssohn symphony survey with a glorious performance of the oddball Symphony no. 2.
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Strong discs from Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Francois-Xavier Roth and his Paris-based period-instrument ensemble Les Siècles, and the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, an ad-hoc summer orchestra comprised of some of the U.S.’s finest conservatory musicians.
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Garth Edwin Sunderland’s new chamber adaptation of this opera’s score, is, to date, the Bernstein Centennial Year’s best and most important recording.
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Anna Shelest’s new recording of piano-and-orchestra pieces by Anton Rubinstein is one of those albums that makes you want to rethink Rubinstein’s relative neglect in the broader canon – almost.
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Rethinking the Repertoire: Postlude
The moral should be to err in favor of the audacious. That’s what this world – and this art form – require.
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