Hildur Guðnadóttir celebrates two decades of music on This Will Be Us, placing old compositions in new skins with Robert Ames and the DSO Berlin. When initially recording her first album, Mount A (as Lost in Hilderness), she set out to “involve other people as little as she could;” now she admits, “I always dreamed of having more people playing with me.” This is not to say that the new versions are the definitive or even better versions, because there is great appeal in the intimacy of her solo work, which jump-started her career. In her early years she worked with luminaries such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ben Frost and Múm; in later years she has become famous for her scoring work, from the award-winning Chernobyl and The Joker to this year’s The Bride! and…
Category: classical
When you learn that this album is all bassoon, from top to bottom, you might think, “I don’t want that!” But you do, and here is why: It will put you in a great mood.
What could be better than a chorus of bassoons singing and bopping around in your head? Anyone who has spent time with bassoonists knows that they are delightfully quirky. Relatively recently some composers, notably Stravinsky, started to give the singular instrument that is the modern bassoon the respect it deserves, after which it was only a matter of time before these humble geniuses would start to take their creativity seriously and find their voices. Here we have such a bassoonist in Rebekah Heller, who commissioned three of the works and arranged the other two.
Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica ensemble continue the longstanding relationship with ECM’s New Series on Pages of a Biography, bringing together music by Georgs Pelēcis, Andrius Žlabys and Arvo Pärt.
Pärt’s ‘Passacaglia’, written for Kremer’s 70th birthday, and ‘Darf ich…’ frame Žlabys’s ‘Kaleidoscope of Lost Time’, dedicated to Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, and Pelēcis’s title concerto, written for Kremer and drawing on memories of their youth together in Riga. The programme continues a musical relationship with the Baltic region that has been central to Kremer’s work with ECM since Tabula Rasa, the recording that inaugurated the New Series. Here, personal history and musical memory meet in…
Best known for his film scores, particularly those associated with Studio Ghibli, Joe Hisaishi has continued to pursue a career as both a composer and conductor, revealing a more abstract side of his musical language. Released in 2026, Symphony No. 3 (“Metaphysica”) & Harp Concerto brings together two orchestral works that shed light on this lesser-known aspect of his writing. Conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Hisaishi is joined by harpist Emmanuel Ceysson for the world-premiere recording of the Harp Concerto, composed specifically for him.
Created in 2021 to mark the 50th anniversary of the New Japan Philharmonic, Symphony No. 3 is a large-scale work in three movements (“Existence,” “Where Are We Going?,” and “Substance”)…
Some music carries its architecture within it; other music waits for a building to reveal the full shape of its thought. In the Basilica di San Marco, every note enters a space crowded with memory, where gold mosaics hold the afterimage of vanished liturgies. The Tallis Scholars’ concert there on July 14, 2017, begins with Palestrina’s Magnificat primi toni. His counterpoint discovers chambers that masonry alone could never contain. Each vocal line retains its identity while yielding part of its solitude to the others. Peter Phillips founded the ensemble in 1973, beginning a relationship with Renaissance polyphony that helped reshape modern hearing of this repertoire. Under his direction, precision serves the music’s spiritual purpose. San Marco’s reverberation gathers…
William Basinski‘s 2026 work Passing the Cup of Sorrows was inspired by a spiritual hypnotherapy exercise involving an exchange of energy between two souls in the spirit world, in which one spirit comes to understand and forgive someone who hurt them in a past life. Moved by online testimonials of this practice, Basinski attempted to interpret this transformation process through music. The 38-minute piece consists of intimately recorded solo piano, with background noises audible at certain points, along with sparse electronic effects. Basinski typically plays a short melodic pattern and lets the notes decay, patiently waiting before playing again. Notes that have already been played sporadically flash back during the in-between spaces and still…
A classical dimension has always been part of Raphael Weinroth-Browne‘s music, be it in the formal rigour of the compositional writing or the finesse of the Canadian cellist’s playing. It’s even more pronounced on his latest release, however, given that Empyrean is an album-length treatment of material created in 2024 for the James Wilton Dance company’s BACH Reimagined project. After touring his commissioned cello score with James and Sarah Wilton, Weinroth-Browne decided to shape it into what’s now the nine-part suite Empyrean. He’s not far wrong in pitching it as “a dialogue with Bach across the centuries.”
Don’t get the wrong idea: the album isn’t some mid-career pivot into classical, full stop; instead, it’s another of his…
Inspired by the MaddAddam trilogy of Margaret Atwood, Max Richter’s latest is based on a score of his third collaboration with ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor following Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), and is a representation of a world becoming devoured by industrial technology and commercial hostility.
In this developing dystopia, the survival of human emotions and of the natural environment are in doubt, but Richter’s emphasis on the evolution of a new humanity in response to mechanised terror is clear and heartening.
The opening track, “Wave After Wave”, stresses the notion of transformation as the beautiful theme from “Europe, After the Rain” from his first album, Memoryhouse (2002), is — nearly…
Several months after more eaze released the intimate art-pop album sentence structure in the country, the artist issued a related but much different effort, valley and structure. The album is based on live performances, and it focuses on repetition and harmonization, with the artist remarking that she’s been fascinated with ostinato since childhood. It might be easy to label this her post-minimalist album, but some of her pop influences are still present.
While the album as a whole isn’t more eaze’s most lyrical work, “i’m in the structure” is essentially an alternate version of the previous record’s “the producer,” replacing the original’s intimacy and ticking drum machine with shadowy reverb burying the vocals, distorted drum…
The second ECM Reich LP. Three pieces representing three different scales of ensemble. Music for a Large Ensemble (1978), Side A, is Reich’s first major work for genuinely orchestral forces (mallet instruments, brass, strings, voice, around thirty players), a step toward the chamber-orchestra writing that would define the eighties Reich. Octet (1979), Side B opener, scored for two pianos, string quartet, two clarinets and two flutes: more contrapuntal and chamber-music-like than its predecessors. Violin Phase (1967), Side B closer, Shem Guibbory plays all four violin parts (three pre-recorded against one live), the canonical recording of one of the early phase pieces.
Recorded August 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, the same West German facility ECM…
The piece in which Reich turned to his Jewish heritage. Tehillim (Hebrew for “Psalms”) sets four psalm-fragments (19:2-5, 34:13-15, 18:26-27, 150:4-6) for four high voices and chamber ensemble, in a setting where for the first time in Reich’s mature work the text drives the rhythmic structure rather than being fitted into a pre-existing pattern. The vocal writing draws on Hebrew cantillation Reich studied with Cantor Edward Berman in New York; the percussion is tuned tambourines without jingles, clapping, maracas, marimba, vibraphone, crotales.
Recorded September-October 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, engineer Martin Wieland, produced by Manfred Eicher. George Manahan conducts. Sopranos Pamela Wood…
Ever since Lucas Debargue took fourth prize at the 2015 international Tchaikovsky competition, he’s refused to be pigeonholed. His distinctive journey brings him now to George Gershwin, complementing the piano concerto and preludes with beguiling original explorations of the composer’s songs in the form of a dozen études. His supple account of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is based on Gershwin’s solo piano arrangement, to which he adds his own partly improvised cadenzas. Like everything here, it comes up fresh as a daisy.
‘The Piano Concerto in F’ brings Debargue’s jazz credentials to the fore (he cut his teeth on the club circuit). The Orchestre de Paris under Elim Chan provides an admirably clear and concise accompaniment. The edge-of-your-seat…
There is a long tradition of mainly Christian spirituality associated with the tidal island of Lindisfarne, long enough for it to be known by some as Holy Island.
There is also a not quite so long tradition of English songwriting that combines elements of classical and folk, from the Renaissance compositions of John Dowland and Henry Purcell through to the 20th century songs of Vaughan Williams and of the eccentric Peter Warlock.
On Lindisfarne: Beyond the Causeway, lyricist and instrumentalist Christian Forshaw (assorted saxophones, clarinets, and keyboards) and noted soprano Grace Davidson (Hamnet, Lord of the Rings Live) draw on both traditions to create a thoughtful and highly engaging contemporary…
In Steve Reich’s music, repetition is a method of survival. A phrase returns carrying the microscopic damage of having been heard, while attention acquires an unfamiliar capacity for desire. Recordings on ECM brings that reciprocal transformation back to vinyl, gathering the three albums ECM released between 1978 and 1982. Revisiting the collection issued on CD in 2016, this three-LP edition, one day shy of the composer’s 90th birthday.
Sourced from the original analogue master tapes, the records reproduce their original sleeves; archival photographs accompany Paul Griffiths’s liner notes. Inside the music, strict procedures open improbable apertures, and counting becomes a form of surrender.
…A major downtown transit hub, Chicago’s Union Station occupies an archaic building that is poorly designed, often crowded, and notoriously associated with delayed commuter trains. Sections of it are literally falling apart.
In May 2025, cellist Lia Kohl set up in Union Station’s Great Hall with nine other musicians from Chicago’s improvised / creative music scene for a free, 43-minute rush-hour set.
The instrumentation included cellos, bass clarinets, sax, trombones, tuba, and violin. The performance functions as a piece of sound art that combines slow-moving chamber music with the ambient noise of the space. Alongside strings, horns and reeds, one can hear voices, travelers walking by, luggage carts, and…
Late Brahms speaks in fragments, memories and subtle revelations. In these intimate piano works, every gesture carries the weight of a lifetime distilled into a few measures: songs without words, reflections that seem to emerge from silence and return to it. Here Sir András Schiff brings together the Albumblatt (an early piece, discovered in 2012), the Klavierstücke op. 76, the Fantasien op. 116, the Intermezzi op. 117, the Klavierstücke op. 118 and op. 119 in a recital that traces the inward arc of Brahms’s final decades. Rather than monumental statements, these are conversations with memory-music of extraordinary concentration, where tenderness and clarity coexist. Recorded in the Kammermusiksaal Hermann J. Abs in Bonn on a Blüthner piano from…
…features two further recordings that complement the original album’s ultimate collection of Arvo Pärt’s music for solo piano.
Arvo Pärt is the world’s most often heard classical composer; he trades that position numerically with John Williams, but does not, as Williams does, exist on the border between classical and another genre. His 90th birthday in 2025 has stimulated the release of some interesting albums, and this one made classical best-seller lists in the late summer of that year. One might not associate the percussive piano with the delicate shades of Pärt’s minimalist ensemble music, but pianist Georijs Osokins here (or the good marketing folks at Deutsche Grammophon) asserts that he wants to explore “the hidden relations between different…
Within the somewhat unusual confluence of synthesizers and a small orchestral ensemble, Canadian artist Flore Laurentienne produces music rooted in the landscape of his country and inspired by the vastness of the St. Lawrence River. The music is bright, simple, and powerful. Led by Minimoog player Mathieu David Gagnon, Flore Laurentienne are comprised of a string quartet, two keyboardists and a percussionist and their new album, Volume III, highlights the concept of beauty in chaos, and like the press materials suggest, the message is one of light: “It is the seed in the ground that becomes a plant and then a flower, blooming at its peak and then inevitably wilting so that the cycle can begin again.”
Following in the footsteps, needless to say,…