Gramophone's Orchestra of the Year Award is the only Gramophone Classical Music Award decided by public vote (vote here). The 10 orchestras nominated this year are: Bayerisches Staatsorchester (Germany), Budapest Festival Orchestra (Hungary), Czech Philharmonic (Czech Republic), The Hallé (UK), Les Siècles (France), Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Europe), Oslo Philharmonic (Norway), Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (USA), Sinfonia of London (UK), Vienna Philharmonic (Austria).

This week, we focus on ...

Les Siècles

François-Xavier Roth’s superb French period-band this year took on, and magnificently delivered, one of opera’s greatest challenges, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Mark Pullinger enjoyed ‘the orchestral contributions of Les Siècles and the lucidity that period instruments bring to Debussy’s score’. The colours Roth finds come as no surprise given the superb series of recordings of French music they have already made together (securing Gramophone Awards and Editor’s Choices). Their album of the Ravel piano concertos had Harriet Smith writing of the Left-hand Concerto that ‘the opening, which is so often reduced to a murky rumbling, here has the clarity of a finely restored Rembrandt’, a review that propelled it to be named our Recording of the Month for July.

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