Classical Music
Four new albums: the standouts include the finest Andris Nelsons/BSO Shostakovich collaboration to date and the Neave Trio’s wonderful new French Moments.
Colin Carr supplied an extraordinary performance of Bach’s Six Cello Suites.
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.
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.
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.
You know a Cowboy Junkies tune the second that you hear it, but the songs don’t come off as formulaic or produced for mass consumption.
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.
One of the most astonishing sets of my week in Montreal featured two Frenchmen, accordionist Vincent Peirani and soprano saxophonist Émile Parisien.
Pianist Constantine Finehouse and violinist Daniel Kurganov are well-matched musicians, and have recorded a superb album.
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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