This Week, I Pressed Play

5 new classical releases I’ve been genuinely excited about

Classical music can sometimes feel as if it only exists in the past. Dead composers, old scores, famous recordings everyone tells you you “must” hear before you’re allowed an opinion.

But the funny thing is, new classical recordings are coming out all the time. Some revisit familiar pieces, some dig up less obvious corners of the repertoire, and some just make you hear a composer differently.

So this week, I’m doing something slightly different. Not a country playlist, not a seasonal theme, not a historical rabbit hole. Just 5 new albums I’ve been genuinely excited about.

Some are big and glossy. Some are intimate. One is basically a party. And one has reminded me, yet again, that Prokofiev is one of those composers that gets under your skin and just won’t leave.

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La Torre del Oro - Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata

Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L’Arpeggiata are definitely among this newsletter’s favourites, and I’ve brought them here a few times before. What I love about them is the balance. There’s proper research and thought behind what they do, but it never feels like homework. They know the history, then they open the windows and have a very good time with it.

La Torre del Oro is named after the golden tower on the River Guadalquivir in Seville, and the album follows musical routes between Spain, Central America and South America. So, after last week’s Spanish playlist, this arrived at exactly the right time.

This is what Pluhar does so well: she makes old music feel social again. Not precious. Not sealed away. Alive, rhythmic, colourful and completely up for it.

There’s composed music here, folk influence, dance, improvisatory energy and that unmistakable L’Arpeggiata feeling of musicians properly listening to each other in the moment. It’s fun, immediate and completely joyous. Exactly what I want from Pluhar, and she keeps delivering.

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French Orchestral Favourites - Sinfonia of London and John Wilson

This album will tick a lot of boxes for a lot of people. For seasoned classical listeners, some of the repertoire might look a bit obvious: Bizet, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Dukas. The sort of names that appear on albums with titles like French Orchestral Favourites. But there is absolutely no shame in bringing people a lot of good music and playing it brilliantly.

And John Wilson really is one of the conductors I keep coming back to. He has this wonderful combination of precision and pleasure. The music is tidy, but it doesn’t feel buttoned up. He understands line, movement, pacing and, crucially, entertainment. He’s also done a huge amount for musicals and film music, which I think you can hear in the way he conducts orchestral colour.

If you want easy listening done properly, this is it. Not background music. Not classical wallpaper. Just music that is direct, colourful and beautifully played.

The track I’d start with is the last one actually - the Danse bohême from Bizet’s Carmen Suite No. 2. A suite, in this context, is basically a collection of orchestral excerpts taken from a larger work. So instead of hearing the full opera Carmen, with singers, plot, and dialogue, you get some of the most recognisable orchestral moments gathered together.

The Danse bohême begins lightly, almost teasingly, then starts to gather speed until it tips into a full bacchanal, wild, wine-fuelled party.

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Mahler: Symphony No. 5 - Andris Nelsons and Wiener Philharmoniker

If you think you don’t know Mahler’s 5th symphony, you might want to think again, because there’s a decent chance you’ve heard the fourth movement, the famous Adagietto. Even if you don’t know its name, you may well recognise that slow, glowing music for strings and harp.

If you really don’t know it, you’re in for a treat.

Mahler’s 5th is probably one of the more approachable of his symphonies. That doesn’t mean it’s small or simple. It absolutely isn’t. But it gives you a lot to hold on to: a dramatic trumpet opening, funeral music, huge orchestral climaxes, a wild scherzo, which is a fast, dance-like movement, and then that famous Adagietto, where everything seems to stop and breathe.

There are already so many legendary recordings of this symphony, so the obvious question is: why this one?

For me, a lot of it comes down to Andris Nelsons. I once heard him conduct Strauss in London and the feeling in the hall was electric. Not in a flashy way. More that he seemed completely inside the music, as if he understood its emotional temperature from the inside out. That quality matters in Mahler, because this music can so easily become overblown. It needs drama, but it also needs architecture. It needs feeling, but not hysteria.

And then there is the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra with a long, complicated and very real connection to Mahler. Mahler lived and worked in Vienna, and you can hear that tradition in the sound: the warmth, the depth.

The Adagietto here is definitely on the slower side, but I found that really compelling. It gives the music space. It doesn’t just sound pretty; it feels suspended. Almost outside normal time.

Nelsons and the Vienna Philharmonic recorded the complete Mahler symphonies, and this 5th has been released ahead of the full cycle later this year. It feels like a major recording, and I suspect it will become one of those versions people keep talking about.

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A Poet’s Love - Helen Charlston and Sholto Kynoch

Helen Charlston is a British mezzo-soprano I’ve had my eye on for a while. She’s making a serious name for herself, and although she’s already singing in important places, she also feels like one of those singers that singers like. The industry’s own favourite.

Her voice has a slightly acidic edge to it, which I mean as a compliment. It’s not blandly beautiful. It has colour, bite and individuality, and that matters. There are many beautiful voices out there, but the ones that stay with you usually have something a little more specific about them.

But it’s not just the voice that interests me. Charlston is what I’d call a very ‘classy singer’. By that I don’t mean polite or expensive-sounding. I mean you can hear the thought. The phrasing, the words, the dynamics, the tiny changes of colour. It all feels considered without feeling overworked.

This album takes her into German romantic song, and I’ll admit, I was slightly suspicious at first. I knew her more through English and Baroque repertoire, so I wasn’t sure how this would sit. But that suspicion disappeared quickly. This music suits her beautifully, and Sholto Kynoch’s playing is just as sensitive and nuanced. It feels like a real duo, not singer plus accompanist.

The main work on the album is Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, which translates as the album’s title - A Poet’s Love. It’s a song cycle, and a song cycle is basically a group of songs designed to be performed together. Not quite a plot in the opera sense, but a journey. The songs are connected by poems, mood, story, character or emotional development.

In Dichterliebe, Schumann sets poems by Heinrich Heine, and the cycle moves through love, longing, irony, hurt and heartbreak. I’ve performed this cycle myself, so I do feel I know it very well, and Charlston’s interpretation made my ears perk up more than once.

One of my favourite songs in the cycle (and one of Schumann’s most beautiful songs in my opinion) is No. 5, Ich will meine Seele tauchen, which means something like, ‘I want to bathe my soul’. It’s incredibly short, but Schumann somehow manages to make it feel like a whole private world passing by in under a minute. Nothing huge happens, and yet everything happens.

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Prokofiev - Nemanja Radulović

I know a fair bit of Prokofiev’s music, and you probably know at least one piece too: Peter and the Wolf. You may also know bits of Romeo and Juliet, especially the music often used to signal power, menace and people walking very slowly into a room.

But I can’t say I knew his violin music especially well. The Serbian violinist Nemanja Radulović released this album devoted to Prokofiev, and it immediately pulled me in.

Radulović is a proper virtuoso, but not in a neat, polite, glass-case sort of way. There’s personality in the playing. A bit of danger. A bit of theatre. And that works extremely well for Prokofiev, because Prokofiev is rarely just beautiful. There’s usually something else going on. A strange angle. A wrong-footed rhythm. A sweetness that suddenly turns metallic.

I was especially drawn to the second movement of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2. It’s beautiful and slightly strange, with one of those melodies that seems simple until you realise it has completely got under your skin. That’s Prokofiev all over, really. There’s light, but there’s shade. There’s charm, but there’s also something sinister waiting at the edge of the room.

And maybe that’s why I find him so addictive. Once Prokofiev gets into your head, he’s very hard to get out.

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So there we are. 5 new recordings, 5 very different ways in.

Proof, if needed, that classical music isn’t just sitting politely in the past. It’s still being recorded, rethought and brought back to life, one album at a time.

Not a bad week for pressing play.

Have a good weekend! x