Welcome to this month’s Gramophone Player, where you can listen to music related to the latest edition of Gramophone magazine, as well as explore some superb Archive discoveries.

The cover of the November issue of Gramophone is given over to a tribute to Dame Joan Sutherland, who died earlier this month. The Gramophone Player includes two recordings by Sutherland, Bellini’s “Casta Diva” from Norma, and a film of her singing Verdi’s “Addio del passato” from La traviata.

Also new in the Gramophone Player, this month’s complete work is Stanford’s Songs of the Sea, performed by the superb bass-baritone Gerald Finley, the subject of a fascinating interview in the new magazine. The work is taken from the 2006 Chandos release, conducted by Richard Hickox, to which James Inverne gave the Editor’s Choice accolade at the same year’s Awards. Writing of Finley’s interpretation, he described him as: “always elegant, but heroic and heartfelt, Finley is the gentleman-officer…Finley has a way of homing straight in to the centre of the notes for maximum power without sacrificing nobility.”

The Gramophone Player also contains movements from all of this month’s Editor’s Choice discs, including the Recording of the Month – Pierre Boulez conducting Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto (soloist Christian Tetzlaff) and Symphony No 3 – as well as excerpts from the DVD of the month. And finally, our newly transferred complete Archive Recording is a 1954 recording of pianist Ginette Doyen playing Chabrier’s Seven Pieces for piano and Saint-Saëns’s Five Pieces for piano.

Each recording has a click-through link to a page containing the Gramophone review, as well as “buy button” taking you directly to a retailer. And don’t forget that that you can still hear excerpts from the recordings honoured in this year’s Gramophone Awards, as well as watch videos of the critics’ verdicts and recipients’ speeches. 

So login – or if not registered, sign-up for free – click the “Launch Player” link on the right, and enjoy this month’s music!