Harmonia Mundi
NDR Radiophilharmonie and Stanislav Kochanovsky may generate new fans for Tchaikovsky’s four orchestral suites; if you only want to dip your toes in Thomas Adès’ extraordinary music, his own take makes for a worthy introduction.
Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s debut CD is breathtaking, released a few months after the pair’s acclaimed performance at Carnegie Hall earlier this year.
Conductor Benjamin Zander put the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra to challenging work at Symphony Hall, while, on record, Isabelle Faust delivers a vital, urgent, and engrossing traversal of the Britten Violin Concerto.
Violist Timothy Ridout’s new double-album “A Lionel Tertis Celebration” is heartily recommended; soprano Asmik Grigorian’s “Laws of Solitude” not so much.
Spiffy discs of French music featuring the Orchestre National de Lyon led by Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider and François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles.
The French chamber orchestra Divertimento’s debut recording, which includes “classical” and “folk” tracks, is enchanting and often thought-provoking.
Aside from English pronunciation issues, the singers put over this remarkably polished and attractive opera by one of England’s great seventeenth-century composers with great panache, matching the superb instrumentalists.
Conductor René Jacobs restores missing bits of this beloved opera’s story, and Ukrainian soprano Kateryna Kasper glows as Ännchen.
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
I am honestly puzzled by the casualness or, at times, ferocity with which some people nowadays reject classical music as inherently narrow or elitist.
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