Classical Albums of the Week

May 3, 2021. The Jasper String Quartet and Jupiter String Quartet combine to express  joyful personal connections in chamber music with pieces composed centuries apart. Felix Mendelssohn’s masterful 1825 Octet in E flat major is joined by contemporary works by Dan Visconti and Osvaldo Golijov in our Classical Album of the Week.

April 26, 2021. What a pleasure to introduce you to Thibaut Garcia, the young French guitarist with Spanish heritage who has expressed the beauty in Joaquin Rodrigo's 1939 composition Concierto de Aranjuez with gusto in our Classical Album of the Week. Garcia's connection with his roots can be deeply felt here.

Premiered in late 2019, and digitally released in April, 2021, A Native Hill provides solace and reflection about our human place in the natural world. British composer Gavin Bryars wrote the music to text by American environmentalist Wendell Berry, specifically for the voices in the Philadelphia-based professional chamber choir, The Crossing, and presented it as a gift to the ensemble.

April 19, 2021. The Grammy-winning Catalyst Quartet uncovers music and the stories of the people who wrote it in its new recording series, UNCOVERED. The first volume focuses on music by late 19th-century English composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

April 12, 2021. Sergei Rachmaninoff considered The Philadelphia Orchestra his favorite American ensemble, and our Classical Album of the Week reveals why.

April 4, 2021. Holocaust Remembrance Day is April 8th, so this week we turn to the music of 20th-century, Bohemian-born composer Walter Kaufmann, who wrote most of his works in exile, having escaped the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

March 29, 20201. Up for a trivia challenge? If I were to say these next few hundred words are about a gifted, creative mind, a turn-of-the-century woman who was a friend of Rainer Maria Rilke and also happened to attend the 1911 premiere of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier in Dresden, the history buffs and armchair musicologists among us might manage a few guesses. Who is the woman in question?

March 22, 2021. All Things Are Quite Silent is the debut commercial recording of the Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and The Pembroke College Girls’ Choir. Under their remarkable conductor, Anna Lapwood, the choirs perform a sonically elegant program of short a capella selections by composers ranging from Josef Rheinberger to Caroline Shaw. And in keeping with our celebration of women’s history month, the work of women composers comprise the majority of the album.

March 15, 2021. The Pacifica Quartet's new album, Contemporary Voices, features works by three Pulitzer Prize winners, including Shulamit Ran, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Jennifer Higdon. Higdon talks to us about how her 1993 piece, Voices, featured on this album, has the seeds of many of her subsequent works.

March 8, 2021. Mon Ami, Mon Amour (my friend, my love) is the title of a new album of French music by cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Mari Kodama. Haimovitz and Kodama lovingly interpret works by French composers from the early 20th century, with an understanding of each composition's subtlety and distinctly French style.