Welcome to our guide to the best new classical releases this week. We’ve provided links to the albums on Apple Music, so you can dive straight in and enjoy the best new classical albums in great sound, and links to the Gramophone reviews where possible.

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1. Lise Davidsen: Beethoven - Wagner - Verdi

Our Young Artist of the Year in 2018, Lise Davidsen is the cover star of the April issue of Gramophone (out now), and in it she talks to Neil Fisher about practising in lockdown, tackling ‘forbidden’ roles on record, and her desire to be back on stage. Davidsen’s new album with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder includes Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, Beethoven's Ah! perfido and arias by Verdi, Mascagni and Cherubini. As Hugo Shirley wrote in his review, this ‘is another fine album from an artist who, quite simply, is one of the greatest voices to be heard today.’

Read the Gramophone review in the Reviews Database

2. Bach Phantasy

This is the second volume in Phantasm's novel exploration of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. In his review of the first volume in the March 2020 issue, Mark Seow wrote: ‘It’s thrilling. Phantasm unfailingly occupy a sweet spot of individual voices in psychic attunement. In other words, Bach’s imitative forms are infused with the inimitability of human nature as well as the equally human endeavour to be one. We hear both generous, marital blend as well as the fragile variation and asymmetry of human interaction.’

Read the review of the first volume in the Reviews Database

3. Mozart completed

Rachel Podger produced a very successful complete survey of Mozart's violin sonatas with pianist Gary Cooper for Channel Classics more than a decade ago, and here she returns to Mozart alongside Christopher Glynn for world premiere recordings of Timothy Jones's completions of fragments of four sonatas by Mozart. The fragments were left incomplete at the time of Mozart's death and Jones has undertaken alternative completions for three of the four sonatas so that listeners can enjoy different musical journeys from the same point of departure. 

4. Vaughan Williams Folk Songs

This is the second volume in a series from Albion Records that will present all 80 of Vaughan Williams's folk-song arrangements for voice and piano or violin. Volume 1 was reviewed in the December issue by Andrew Achenbach: 'The rewards are copious: baritone Roderick Williams is suitably rollicking in ‘Bold General Wolfe’ and ‘Captain Grant’; soprano Mary Bevan ravishes the ear and touches to the marrow in ‘Farewell, lads’; and tenor Nicky Spence displays a personable empathy with the cannily resourceful deeds of ‘Lovely Joan’...an absolute must for all true Vaughan Williams aficionados. What are you waiting for?'

Read the review of the first volume in the Reviews Database

5. Before Bach

Ensemble Correspondances and Sébastien Daucé have made some fabulous recordings for Harmonia Mundi in recent years, particularly in works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704), Étienne Moulinié (1599-1669) and music from the early reign of Louis XIV (1653). This new album features Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri, a recording of which (if you are looking for recent comparative versions) by Ricercar Consort and Philippe Pierlot was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award last year (read the review).

6. Mullova’s Beethoven

Viktoria Mullova recorded Beethoven's Third and Ninth (Kreutzer) violin sonatas with Kristian Bezuidenhout back in 2010, and here returns with the Fourth, Fifth (Spring) and Seventh sonatas with Alasdair Beatson at the fortepiano for Onyx. Mullova, of course, has a great pedigree in Beethoven's music, having recorded the Archduke Trio alongside André Previn and Heinrich Schiff, and the Violin Concerto with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

7. Brahms Trios & Sonatas

Xavier Phillips and Francois-Frederic Guy’s recording of Beethoven's complete works for cello and piano was our Recording of the Month in January 2016 and it was subsequently shortlisted for Gramophone’s Chamber Award (read the review). Here they are joined by viola player Miguel da Silva for Brahms’s Viola Trio, Op 114, and First and Second Viola Sonatas, Op 120.

The Listening Room

Gramophone’s The Listening Room is an Apple Music playlist featuring hand-picked selection of the most interesting new classical releases chosen by Editor-in-Chief James Jolly. It’s the essential classical playlist:

Specialist Classical Chart

The Official Specialist Classical Chart Top 20 appears on the Gramophone website and is updated every Friday at 6pm (UK time). It’s another great way of exploring the new classical releases and well worth checking every week: 

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