Christian Li signed to Decca when he was just 12 years old. Now 17, this album represents a ‘coming of age’ moment for the young violinist as he records Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. With the winning combination of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and their Conductor Laureate, Vasily Petrenko, the album includes several transcriptions of popular Tchaikovsky works, arranged for violin and piano or string ensemble. “Whatever he touches, this young violinist emerges as an extraordinary wunderkind.” BBC Music Magazine.

Matthias Bamert and the LMP have dusted off some treats in their 'Contemporaries of Mozart' series for Chandos. This latest release, featuring premiere recordings of six symphonies by the Bohemian-born Josef Myslivecek, is one of the best. None of these works, dating back to the 1770s is much more than 10 minutes long, yet each is delightfully imaginative, and benefitting from the LMP's sprightly playing.

The musicians of Les Ombres pay tribute to Luigi Boccherini. The free and audacious composer was an insatiable traveler and the inventor of the string quartet whose belatedly acknowledged genius has now earned him a major place in the history of music.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team. For the first time, the listener and interested reader can follow Schubert’s textual alterations and can appreciate the importance the written word had for the composer.

This disc, suitably and finely recorded with depth in 1985, is a very fine rendition of Vaughan Williams' seventh symphony, subtitled Antarctica, reflecting the source of its inspiration. The film depicts Scott's ill-fated expedition to the South Pole and Vaughan Williams was commissioned to write the music. While doing so, he became so engrossed by the subject that he reworked much of the material into his next symphony. The degree of reworking combined with fresh material took the music out of the realm of a film score suite and more properly into a symphonic conception.

The Wiener Philharmoniker, or Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, has attained a kind of exalted status among symphonic ensembles of the German-speaking world. In fact, it may be so exalted that it only occasionally, when properly motivated, bestirs itself to creativity. From this perspective, this cycle of Beethoven symphonies, with Andris Nelsons conducting the venerable Viennese, is a success worthy of the shelf and hard drive space among all the other hundreds of Beethoven symphony cycles. Nelsons generally makes his Beethoven brisk enough to put the players into a bit of a state of tension, and when they execute, the results are thrilling indeed, in a way that brings the entire weight of the Vienna tradition alive.

This is another absolute gem, in which Herve Niquet and his ensemble, Le Concert Spirituel, show sparkling variety. (Classic CD)

Expressing his own cultural identity, guitarist Thibaut Garcia combines Rodrigo's archetypally Spanish Concierto de Aranjuez with a declaration of l'esprit français: Alexandre Tansman's neoclassical Musique de cour, inspired by the court of Louis XIV. Garcia's heritage is Spanish, but he is French, born in the city of Toulouse, where this album was recorded with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse and the young British conductor Ben Glassberg. It is completed by four solo pieces by Regino Sáinz de la Maza, the guitarist who gave the premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1940.

Originally released in 1966, Bernard Haitink's vivid recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 3 in D minor is coupled here with a 1973 performance of Das klagende Lied; since these are among the least performed and least familiar works in Mahler's catalog, the pairing is mutually beneficial to each, and listeners who have neither in their collections would do well to consider snapping up this affordable set. Perhaps the only flaw should be mentioned up front: though virtually no tape hiss is audible, there is a bit of an acoustic "vacuum" around the sound of the musicians, suggesting that the analog masters have been cleaned up a bit too efficiently and some resonance seems lost.

Giovanni Antonini, virtuoso flautist and orchestral conductor, is the founder of the Italian ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, which burst on the baroque musical scene in 1985; together they have amassed an impressive discography.
With Antonini as soloist in a programme of his own devising recorded between 2011 and 2017, a generous bouquet of the Concerti per Flauto: RV 433 (‘La Tempesta di Mare’), plus the Concertos RV 441, 442 443, 444, and 445, and an amazing version of ‘Cum Dederit’, a solo from Nisi Dominus RV 608, for the chalumeau, the predecessor to the modern-day clarinet.

It is a little known fact that Bizet’s Symphony No. 1 (Naxos 8.553027), now regarded as a minor masterpiece, was closely modelled on his teacher Gounod’s Symphony No. 1, only rediscovered in the 1950s and still unaccountably neglected. Anyone familiar with Bizet’s Symphony will recognize the melodic and rhythmic similarities of the delightfully vivacious outer movements, the wistful slow movements, and the drone-bass effect of the third movements. Gounod’s Symphony No. 2, a more ambitious and elaborate work, particularly in its wind instrumentation, is more in the style of Beethoven or Mendelssohn.

It’s great to have the team of baritone Roman Trekel and pianist Ulrich Eisenlohr back together for more Schubert. I’ve been waiting for their return ever since Volume 1 in this Naxos Schubert song series, where they made such profoundly beautiful music in their performance of Winterreise (type Q661 in Search Reviews). Here they join with soprano Ruth Ziesak to perform some of Schubert’s more unusual songs–settings of poems by Ossian (James Macpherson) that are exceptional for their freer structures and near-pictorial musical storytelling. The young composer’s imagination seemed to find special inspiration in the powerfully vivid images and fantastic tales embodied in these poems and he gives the singers and accompanist some bold and challenging music to perform. The latter part of the program is devoted to songs on texts by Walter Scott, primarily from Lady of the Lake.

Mozart’s piano sonatas exemplify the economy and subtlety of the composer’s genius. Though simple at first glance, they are works in which each note is filled with musical and expressive purpose. Alexei Lubimov, a master of keyboard repertoire from the Baroque to the contemporary, plays the complete sonatas on three instruments modelled on 18th century originals. These interpretations, which explore the particular possibilities of the fortepiano, led Gramophone to praise Lubimov’s “uncommon sensibility” and “refinements of colouring, articulation and nuance” in playing that “is fluent and even, never mechanical in its brilliance.”

The music of the 17th century is deeply influenced by fearless innovation and bubbling creativity, characterized by experimentation with form that only with the subsequent generation of composers develops into fixed conventions and a higher degree of conformity. Here, a glimpse of the richness represented by the music from the Baltic region in the latter half of the 17th century is presented by bass-baritone Jakob Bloch Jespersen and Concerto Copenhagen under the direction of Lars Ulrik Mortensen.

The incidental music to König Stephan, Op. 117, must be among Beethoven's least often performed works, with only the overture making regular appearances on concert programs. The music was written for a play marking the opening of a theater in what is now Budapest; it was a festive event that drew from Beethoven no profound response. However, aficionados of the transition to Beethoven's late style will be glad to have this recording, one of just a few available. Compared with, say, the incidental music to Egmont, Op. 84, the music is striking in its simplicity, and there are a few hints, notably in the first part of the "Geistlicher Marsch," of the mystical musical language to come.