Among the many young talents which are currently developing on the musical scene, a select few are particularly spellbinding. One of these is Florian Noack whose generosity and solar brilliance shine through from the very first listening. His vivaciousness and curiosity are thrilling and infectious. His "twenty-five" fingers gallop marvellously across the keyboard. And most important of all, his sincerity and humility command respect.  A traveller to the heart of national folk musics, he shares in their unique flavours, by turns exquisite and powerful; he sometimes offers his own unique arrangements... Pianist Florian Noack invites us here on a stunning musical adventure: his first recording for La Dolce Volta, after several albums for Ars Produktion and Artalinna. Florian Noack's album is structured around dance: Brahms, Grieg, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Szymanowski, Komitas, Janáček, Nín, Martucci, Grainger, for a virtuous, poetical and intimate sequence. Florian Noack deploys all the range of his talent to bring us the quintessence of these pieces, which in other hands would seem banal. This is an utterly charming album, which will not leave anyone indifferent: that's for sure! © La Dolce Volta

By no means should you be expecting the "typical" productions we so often associate with the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Together with the soprano Anna Prohaska, she has developed a highly original programme which brings violin and vocals together. In this respect, while we were delighted to find a recording of the beautiful and all too rare Maria-Triptychon, which Frank Martin wrote in 1968 for Irmgard Seefried and her violinist husband Wolfgang Schneiderhan, we wonder whether it was really necessary to dismantle this polyptych whose three movements tell the story of the mother of Christ with perfect fluidity.It must be said that the entirety of this unusual album feels rather all over the place, very much like György Kurtág who unsurprisingly features in this curious inventory of a thousand years of music, from Hildegard von Bingen to the present day.We need to look elsewhere for the main theme and, more precisely, at the questioning of the two musicians around the subject of female emancipation and “the sensitive exploration of their common experiences as women evolving in the current music industry.” This quest for content, set to music around the figure of Mary, evokes a mixture of shimmering colours created by the Camerata de Berne orchestra, and depicts a journey through the ages and arias which incorporates so many of the contradictions of human nature. We highly recommend that you immerse yourself fully, and listen to these twenty tracks from beginning to end. This way you will be better able to appreciate this strangely fascinating patchwork, which feels like a work of art in its own right. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Maybe the combination of Brahms and Bruckner with the British choir Tenebrae sounds a little strange: the choir has specialized in Renaissance music and generally in music built on that sound ideal. Maybe the combination of the abstract, devout, and technically demanding Bruckner with the friendly and humanist Brahms sounds a little strange, too. But it all works out very nicely. In the 19th century, when choral music was a bigger part of everyday musical life than it is now, this would have been a program any good municipal choir would have loved to present. And Tenebrae bulks up its style a bit. They hit Bruckner's punishing high notes with the requisite perfect chill, and you can sample one of the large motets at the beginning, such as Ecce sacerdos (track three), for the full range of this choir's remarkable technical control under director Nigel Short. In Brahms pieces like the familiar "How lovely are thy dwellings" from the German Requiem, Op. 45 (track 11), the choir might even be called unusually weighty. Signum hits the ball out of the park sonically with engineering work at London's Temple Church, and the end result is a satisfying and unusual choral disc. A substantial donation from each copy of this album sold goes to Macmillan Cancer Support.© TiVo

Here are two works composed by Schubert at the very end of his short life. Schwanengesang (Swansong) was written in Vienna in the autumn of 1828. He died on 19 November at the age of thirty-one, and Die Taubenpost (Pigeon post), which closes the collection, is said to be his very last composition. The fourteen songs, by turns light-hearted, sombre and melancholy, are settings of poems by Ludwig Rellstab, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gabriel Seidl. In the summer of the same year he composed his String Quintet in C major, scored for two cellos, which was not premiered until 1850, at the Vienna Musikverein. The power and orchestral dimensions of the work make it a pinnacle of nineteenth-century chamber music. We could not have dreamt of a finer line-up of musicians to record these two Schubert monuments. Fanny Mendelssohn’s Schwanenlied (also to words by Heinrich Heine) completes the programme, along with Felix Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words No. 1 (for solo piano), composed a year after Schubert’s death and Schubert’s own setting of an unrelated Schwanengesang (D. 744, on a poem by Johann Senn). © Alpha Classics

No one can accuse soprano Sandrine Piau of ever resting on her laurels, and with this 2023 release, she began, in her late fifties, a new partnership with accompanist David Kadouch. It is a bit hard to tell what the theme is supposed to be all about. Only some of the songs are "intimes," and many are not about voyages; Piau also notes that some of the songs are about "the theme of people being snatched away from the land of the living," not an especially intimate concept. Best just to listen and take the songs one by one, and this will reveal not only strong performances but organizational principles the performers don't mention. The first part of the program is devoted to German lieder, the second to French mélodies (before a final return to Schubert), with one piano piece in each set. Piau is arguably the greatest French interpreter of German song, and her Schubert Erlkönig, D. 328, has nothing trite about it as she inhabits but doesn't make opera characters out of the three characters in the piece. Another "theme" is that Piau really makes songs by women her own. There is a group by Clara Schumann, with an excellent setting of Heine's Lorelei that owes something to Erlkönig but is in no way a knockoff, and a fine group by Lili Boulanger that fits Piau beautifully. Sample Si tout ceci n'est qu'un pauvre rêve. Perhaps the Mignon songs do not fit her quite so well at this late date, but the heftier numbers by Liszt and Wolf more than make up for this. Yet another theme is that these are all songs that give the pianist a great deal to do, and Piau's interactions with Kadouch are sensitive and detailed enough to make one eagerly anticipate future collaborations. Superbly recorded by Alpha at the Teldex Studio in Berlin, the album made classical best-seller charts in early 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

World famous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and conductor-pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin join forces to take on one of the most brilliant song cycles ever written: Schubert's Winterreise. DiDonato, however, casts a different light on this beloved cycle of 24 songs in telling their story from the perspective of the woman, the lost love. Nancy Plum, from Town Topics (Princeton) writes: "The question of what happened to the woman who sent the narrator on a tortuous journey was not answered in the Wilhelm Müller poetry from which Schubert drew the text, but DiDonato created a scenario onstage of being that woman, reading from the narrator's journal and responding to the inherent despair". "What stood out was the heavy emotion that came through in her singing, as she lingered on a syllable here, pressed her tone there. She created vivid feelings with her contrasts", wrote The New York Classical Review about Joyce Didonato's interpretation. © Warner Classics

Korngold was just 23 when his most celebrated stage work was premiered in 1920 by no less than Otto Klemperer. The rich orchestration and brilliant bel canto vocal writing is here superbly realized by a cast led by Klaus Florian Vogt and Camilla Nylund, with “conducting to die for” (The Guardian) from Mikko Franck. “I regard Die tote Stadt as one of the greatest operas of the first quarter of the 20th century and the Finnish National Opera’s production makes it stand out as a true masterpiece, scenically and musically” (Seen and Heard International). © Opus Arte

Chelsea Guo is a musical polymath who brings her dual gifts as pianist and soprano to this, her debut album. Hailed as a Chopin specialist during her prizewinning performances at the 2020 Chopin Piano Competition, Guo performs solo piano works that show all facets of the composer’s style, including the Barcarolle in F-sharp minor, Op. 60 and the four Op. 33 Mazurkas, in which Chopin took existing folk styles to new heights with his nuanced, ground-breaking approach. Chelsea Guo’s unique talents are to the fore in the three songs on this album, in which she simultaneously sings and plays; the programme also includes Chopin’s complete 24 Preludes, Op. 28, an extraordinary set composed in every available key. © Orchid Classics

Death and the MaidenThe String Quartet in D minor ‘Death and the Maiden’ D.810, written in 1824- 1826, has become, with the Trout Quintet, one of the most famous and popular works by Franz Schubert. While the Trout Quintet was his first piece of chamber music to be well received in his time, reactions to the String Quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’ were initially mixed. In his Reminiscences of Schubert and Beethoven, written in 1881, Franz Lachner, who was befriended with Schubert from 1822, wrote: ‘This quartet, which now delights the entire world and is one of the greatest achievements in the genre, was hardly received with unanimous approval. After playing it through, first violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh, who by reason of this great age was not up to the task, proposed to the composer: “Dear brother, this is nothing, leave it out and keep to your songs”, at which Schubert silently gathered the pages of music and locked them up for ever in his desk.’ The String Quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’ thanks its name to the Andante, a series of five variations on the song of the same name written by Schubert in 1817 to a text by Matthias Claudius. In the song we hear the intense mortal fear of a young girl and her desperate pleas to the Grim Reaper to let her go. Death, posing as a good-natured friend, attempts to soothe her: ‘Sei guten Muts. Ich bin nicht wild, sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen’ (Be of good cheer. I am not fierce, you shall sleep softly in my arms.)A Bohemian in AmericaThe music of Antonín Dvořák is deeply rooted in the folk music of his fatherland Bohemia. Even during his American period his homeland was never far away, as we hear in the Cello Concerto and the Ninth Symphony ‘From the New World’. At the time, between 1892-95, Dvořák was director of the recently established National Conservatory of Music in New York. Despite their decidedly Bohemian character, these compositions and the String Quartet opus 96 have become known as the composer’s American works. 4 Dvořák wrote his String Quartet opus 96 in just three days while on holiday in Spillville, a little colony of Bohemian emigrants in Iowa. He stayed there in the pleasant company of farmers, friendly priests and hearty housewives, among whom he could speak his native language. It has been suggested that this may explain the relative simplicity of the work. About his stay in Spillville Dvořák wrote: ‘As far as my new Symphony, the F-major String Quartet and the Piano Quintet (written here in Spillville) are concerned – I would never have written them in this way if I had not seen America’. The themes of the four movements seem to originate from Bohemian or American folk tunes, in view of the fact that they are based on the pentatonic scale F-G-A-C-D. The second movement suggests a melancholic negro spiritual, as if the Bohemian Dvořák is writing to get his own homesickness out of his mind. The sparkling third movement (Scherzo) imitates the rhapsodic warbling of an American bird, the Scarlet Tanager. The quartet closes with a rondo in which echoes are heard of the church music of ‘Bohemian’ Spillville, which Dvořák and his wife regularly took part in. And do we also hear a steam train speeding along in the distance?

To celebrate his 60th birthday Decca Classics gave Jean-Yves Thibaudet "carte blanche" to choose a very personal selection of music he has never recorded before. Including Dario Marianelli commissioned Pride and Prejudice - Suite to build on 97m streams for Dawn, Thibaudet's own transcriptions of Disney's When You Wish Upon a Star and Barber's Adagio for Strings. © Decca Classics