Complete recordings of great works such as Bach’s sonatas, his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” or Chopin’s “24 Preludes” occupy a unique place within the history of musical recording. It’s in their entirety that they are most unique and powerful, whereas in the purity of their repertoire, individual pieces are generally regarded as being largely heterogeneous. These timeless compositions transcend their authors and are given new life with each interpretation, and such is the case with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Published in 1741, as the fourth and last part of his Clavier-Übung, the “Goldberg Variations” still remain, almost 300 years later, amongst the baroque master’s most important works, not only for the history of musical composition and recording in general (Glenn Gould, Trevor Pinnock, Rosalyn Tureck, and many others come to mind), but also for Víkingur Ólafsson in particular. “I’ve been dreaming of recording this work for 25 years,” says the Icelandic pianist, thus confirming that these studies are more a life’s work than a whim.Beginning with a melody that’s simple in appearance, the work is spread over a total of 30 variations, becoming a masterpiece of complexity. Determined, at surface level, by a rigid formal framework, the material itself nevertheless demands a “sort of interpretive improvisation”. Ólafsson recognises this paradox and makes it his own not by interpreting the different variations with technical precision and a strict loyalty to the metronome, but rather by following cyclical impulses and organic interpretation. At the same time, he evolves with the work and transcends it, whether in the creativity of the fugues or the complexity of the different canons, which influence one another, rely on one another, and, finally, like a parabola, return to the first melody and the beginning of all that had transpired previously -  like the ebb and flow of the Icelandic ocean, whose waves we know will always return to shore, but whose calm or strength we can never be sure of. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

It’s almost as if Yuja Wang were playing at home in her second collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The music of Rachmaninov has no secrets left for the Chinese piano virtuoso, who strolls happily along these formidably difficult concertos. It’s the “Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18”, the most iconic, that leads. Composed in 1901, at the time when Rachmaninov was just beginning to recover from the depression caused by the failure of his first symphony, this concerto became one of the centrepieces of the Russian composer’s work, when it was notoriously sampled in the legendary pop hit “All by myself”. Yuja Wang moves with alarming ease along a score rife with traps, starting with the tenth intervals that are every pianist’s worst nightmare. Wang offers a sublime variety in her playing, marvellously befitting of the very distinct moods of the three movements: raging and bold attacks in the “moderato”, languid legatos in the “adagio sostenuto”, and finishing with a triumphant and luminous “allegro scherzando”. “Concertos No. 1” and “No.4” are served with the same mastery, and the album closes with a “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” where the orchestra proves to be of tremendous precision. An impeccable record. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz

Anyone who aspires to a professional career as a violinist must eventually reckon with Beethoven's Violin Concerto. This exacting instrumental jewel demands not only technical mastery, but also an extraordinary sense of lyricism and emotion from those who seek to make it their own. It is not surprising that, over the centuries, famous virtuosos have never stopped reimagining and recording this masterpiece in order to pass it on to posterity: Fritz Kreisler, Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Isabelle Faust... Now, it is in their footsteps - rather intimidatingly, let's admit - that a new, irresistibly charismatic voice has now arrived.Only 20 years old, María Dueñas possesses the talent and radiance of a long-standing virtuoso. She grew up in Granada and studied in Dresden and Vienna with Boris Kuschnir. Her first major success came in 2021, when she won first prize in the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin Competition. That same year, she attracted the attention of Deutsche Grammophon, with whom she soon signed a contract. It was with this label that she presented her first album, Beethoven and Beyond."Beethoven's Violin Concerto has been with me at the most important moments of my life," says María, for whom it seems only natural to dedicate the first chapter of her discography to this work. She had the chance to record her œuvre with Manfred Honeck and the Vienna Symphony at the beginning of 2023, during a concert held in a hall with a rich history: the Vienna Music Hall - a 'home' debut, as it were. But how to stand out from the crowd? "With the Beethoven concerto, you can't show off your virtuosity, only yourself. And only sound can reveal it.”It was precisely this sound that convinced us! But that's not all: to really add her own touch to the work, María composed her own cadenzas. The album also includes cadenzas by five other famous virtuosos (Louis Spohr, Eugène Ysaÿe, Camille Saint-Saëns, Henryk Wieniawski and Fritz Kreisler) as well as works for violin and orchestra by each of these composers. María takes up the Concerto with a unique sincerity and authenticity and manages to shed a new light on Beethoven, that of her own time. Let us be the first to warn you; instead of Beethoven and Beyond, there will soon be María Dueñas and Beyond. No doubt about it, this is a Qobuzissime! Lena Germann/Qobuz

John Cage's admiration for the music of Erik Satie is well known; Cage organized a Satie festival early in his career, and even casual listeners will detect a spirit of experimentation and a certain irreverence common to the two. Perhaps no one has explored the relationship in greater detail than pianist Bertrand Chamayou on this 2023 release, which hit classical best-seller lists in the autumn of that year. There are several real finds here. One is a rare Cage piece, All Sides of the Small Stone, that was actually dedicated to Satie's memory, and another is a work by Satie specialist James Tenney, Three Pages in the Shape of a Pear (In Celebration of Erik Satie), which suggests lines along which this compositional axis might be extended. In the main body of the program, Chamayou balances Satie and Cage nicely, picking some Cage works that sound quite a bit like Satie and tying the development of the prepared piano closely to these. This is a fresh interpretation. The overall effect has both charm and humor, qualities that aren't always associated with Cage. However, after hearing this album, listeners will feel that maybe they should be. Chamayou has, up to now, been better known for mainstream French and German repertory, but this release reveals him as a talented interpreter of 20th century music as well.© James Manheim /TiVo

The long-awaited new album from Daniil Trifonov is finally here! It comes fully dedicated to the music of Rachmaninoff, and, more specifically, to his three cycles of variations for piano. First of all, we have the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, a late work composed in the summer of 1934, which stands as one of Rachmaninoff’s great scores, alongside the Third Symphony, The Bells, the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom , and the Symphonic Dances. For this recording the Philadelphia Orchestra, working under the leadership of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, focus on the young Russian virtuoso with rapt attention, who then proceeds with another of the Russian composer’s great cycles, the underappreciated Variations on a Theme by Chopin , whose main theme resumes on the opening bars of the 20th Prelude of Op. 28, in C minor. Rachmaninoff designs from a highly polyphonic basis a work of rare complexity, and shape, through its harmonies. He has Chopin in mind, of course, for his lyrical side (Variations 6 and 21), but also J.S Bach (Variation 1), and Schumann – for the big Finale – whose epic touch ghosts the Symphonic Studies Op. 13. This partition, which allowed Trifonov to remove some passages, is believed by some performers to be an immense lyric poem in which notes turn literally into words (notably Jorge Bolet, and his magical phrasing, for Decca in 1986!). Others wish to unify it, like the young Trifonov himself, whose gesture is aimed primarily at a sense of fluidity. After a relatively brief, bright, tribute to Rachmaninov composed by the pianist himself, the album closes with the famous Variations on a Theme by Corelli, which is in fact the theme of "La Follia", which was used ceaselessly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all over Europe. © Qobuz

One may well wonder why (or whether) a non-keyboard version of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, arguably at the apex of the entire tradition of keyboard music, is at all needed. However, Baroque violinist Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque member Chad Kelly, who "reimagined" the work (arranged is not a strong enough word), offer several justifications for their deployment of the Variations across various kinds of chamber music here. "Despite what many respected and respectful commentators have propagated," Kelly says, "it is not a sacrosanct work of pure, absolute and abstract art." Kelly seeks to use the varied settings to clarify Bach's counterpoint, to examine the musical influences that were in the air when Bach wrote the work, and to "be idiomatic to the historical instruments used in its performance and to the individual styles and genres referenced in the work." All this involves rewriting certain passages. That is a lot to ask, but generally, Kelly and Podger make it work. There are just 18 tracks, with several variations often combined into a little suite. This tends to deemphasize the tripartite structure of the variations, with a canon every third variation. Listeners can make up their own mind about that, but most will be impressed enough by the smooth Baroque winds in the slower variations, especially the crucial Adagio Variation 26, that they will be won over by this unorthodox effort. This release made classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

Travis Scott’s third studio album was expected to be his crowning work. After a complete dominance over the rap world and global hits like Pick Up The Phone, Goosebumps and Antidote, the rapper from Houston had a singular ambition for this ASTROWORLD, an album that was postponed several times. A choral manifesto whose result is up to the phenomenon. The album is a logical series of spurious and harrowing collages. Travis here rather poses as a curator or an art director than a total artist. He easily blends samples to concoct his own formula, an unstoppable musical behemoth. Uncredited guests are treated like samples in this massive explosive cocktail, despite the fact that they are some of the biggest names in the business, among whom Drake, 21Savage, The Weeknd, Frank Ocean and Stevie Wonder. This complete levelling of sources and tributes turn ASTROWORLD into a completely polymorphic work, both a mainstream blockbuster and a modern artsy piece. Already a few months old, his hit song BUTTERFLY EFFECT fully blends in, as if the album absorbed all the energies to spit out a single colour. Other tracks like SICKO MOB or NOBYSTANDERS sound like hit songs in the making, despite their complex structure. At the crossroads of sometimes diverging paths, Travis Scott creates a unique balance that could please both the mainstream public and music lovers keen on obscure references. Merrily switching from DJ Screw to the Kardashians, ASTROWORLD is the soundtrack of our times, an impeccable musical maze, vain at times, but in which listeners can delightfully lose themselves. And yet, Travis’ identity is yet to be uncovered within the plethora of strings and borrowed sounds. ASTROWORLD is a great sci-fi flick in which the replicant becomes the norm, the new musical human. © Aurélien Chapuis/Qobuz

Comebacks are Bob Dylan's thing. Call him irrelevant and he'll summon his demons and write another masterpiece. In the 1990s, one of America's greatest creative engines was drifting. The Don Was-produced Under The Red Sky, Dylan's only collection of new songs in the decade, was met with a collective shrug.  In 1995, there was the death of Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia—a "big brother" Dylan would call him in a eulogy he wrote for Rolling Stone.  But starting in late 1996, Dylan began writing  a record's worth of tunes in his home state of Minnesota that, after an extended recording process in California and Florida, would become Time Out of Mind. Critics and fans who'd consigned him to the scrap heap once again were effusive in their astonishment: Maybe Bobby wasn't done after all! Although the lyrics are often bitter and tinged with mortality, the love song melodies on Time Out of Mind are tender and his delivery often more pleading than angry or accusatory. The album also marked a return to writing and performing original materia, producing some of the best songs of his later career including "Make You Feel My Love," "Love Sick" and "Tryin' to Get To Heaven."As with most Dylan albums—even the masterworks—controversies immediately set in. The recording sessions were disorganized, cacophonous events, with conflicts between the artist and producer Daniel Lanois. Dylan disliked the sound of the final product, ending the partnership with Lanois after two albums. Deeper insight into the making of the album is now possible thanks to the five-disc Fragments volume of the always excellent Bootleg Series. More than just a collection of outtakes and live performances from that era, this set crucially includes a new 2022 mix by Michael H. Brauer that strips out much of Lanois' trademark shimmering production and sonic luster, stripping them back to the kind of mix Dylan supposedly preferred. The most obvious result of the remix is that it becomes even clearer that these melodies, mainstays in his live shows ever since, are truly among his best ever. The often-erratic swirl of instrumentation on the original album—three drummers and two pedal steel guitars playing at once—reorders itself and makes more sense. "Make You Feel My Love," for example, becomes a very clean mix of vocals and the powerhouse keyboard duo of Augie Meyers and Jim Dickinson. Throughout the new mixes, Dylan's vocals (always a matter of taste) become more prominent. For fans of the original album, the three discs of outtakes (one previously released) provide depth and insight and include the near classic "Red River Shore," an unrequited love story unreleased until 2008, and early takes of "Mississippi" which appeared on his next album, Love and Theft. The disc of live performances of the Time Out of Mind material with a five-piece band is especially good, featuring remarkably clear sound and several knockout performances including a near-acoustic "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" from Birmingham, England, an ardent, previously-released "Make You Feel My Love" from Los Angeles. and a roaring take from Buenos Aries of " 'Til I Fell in Love With You." A deeper dive than most of the Bootleg series, Fragments embodies the idea of essential. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

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To hear pianist Francesco Piemontesi tell it, he waited until middle age to attempt the Liszt Transcendental Etudes, even though these works are often programmed by hotshot young pianists intent on displaying their technical mastery. What Piemontesi gets is that Liszt's most difficult works have technical depths that are still achieved by only a few. A piece like "Scarbo," from Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit, was at the edge of the technically possible when it was written, but now any competent conservatory graduate can play it. The Transcendental Etudes and the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor are different. A good performance is quite possible, but great ones that evoke the spell in which Liszt held his audiences are rarer. The latter is what the music gets here from Piemontesi. He is strong throughout, but it is in the dense virtuosic passages, with sheets of sound issuing from his piano, unfortunately unidentified in the booklet, that leave the listener amazed. Sample "Mazeppa" from the Etudes or the fugal treatment of the main sonata material for an idea; those sheets of sound never lose their individual notes. Piemontesi is hardly less effective in the slower passages, which have a kind of majesty. He records on home ground at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, and it is an appropriate venue for his remarkable achievement.© James Manheim /TiVo

The late Beethoven recordings of pianist Mitsuko Uchida have been career makers, and it is cause for celebration that she has capped them with the 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120, a work that perhaps poses deeper interpretive challenges than any of the late sonatas. The Variations often show a kind of rough humor, and a performer may pick up on that, or the player may deemphasize the humor and seek out the epic qualities of the Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, and Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. Uchida does neither. The outlines of her usual style, high-contrast and a bit dry, are apparent, but she does not let them dominate her reading. What Uchida realizes is that the abrupt transition from humor to the deepest existential ruminations is part and parcel of Beethoven's late style, and she works to hone the particular character of each Beethoven variation. Her left hand, as usual, is strikingly powerful, and this brings out many striking details (consider the stirring variation 16). The trio of slow minor variations toward the end are given great seriousness but are not in the least overwrought; Uchida achieves an elusive Olympian tone through the final variations. There is much more to experience here, for each variation is fully thought out, but suffice it to say that this is one of the great performances of the Diabelli Variations.© TiVo

While the recordings of highlights and hits from Rodgers & Hammerstein's still-popular Oklahoma! have been issued over the years, the complete, as originally orchestrated score (by Richard Rodney Bennett) had yet to be recorded. However, following a live-staged performance at the 2017 BBC Proms, conductor John Wilson took it upon himself to deliver this premiere. He sticks with the original orchestra dimensions as well, which is a good thing since the handpicked members of his Sinfonia of London are powerful enough in this smaller group. Wilson also took advantage of the quality theaters around London, bringing in soloists and a cast ensemble of veterans from stages across England. He does well in selecting a cast here; while all are more than capable singers, they are also able to deliver the vocal acting that is necessary to pull this off. Leading the cast are Nathaniel Hackmann, reprising his role as Curly from the Proms performance, and Sierra Boggess as Laurey. The vocalists and orchestra take full advantage of the space and recording setup, which allows the orchestra to play full out while not overstraining the singers. The beauty of Rodgers' music paired with Hammerstein's book is evident, even if you are unfamiliar with anything but the titular state (if even that!); the imagery of ranches and open cattle land easily comes to mind. This recording should be welcomed with open arms by those who are familiar with the musical, be it either from a stage (generally edited and with cuts) or in its film version with its edits. Oh, what a beautiful mornin', indeed.© Keith Finke /TiVo

In a world of "singles," pursued even by classical music labels nowadays, here is a whole album that makes up a single, sublime musical utterance. Reflet is a follow-up, similarly concerned with light effects, to soprano Sandrine Piau's German-language Clair-Obscur of a few years back. The German songs might have been a bigger stretch for Piau than the French material here, but Reflet has possibly an even more sublime coherence. One feels that every note is almost foreordained as the program opens with classic orchestral songs from Berlioz, Henri Duparc, and the less common Charles Koechlin, proceeding into darker, more mysterious realms with Ravel's Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, and ending with the youthful ebullience of Britten's Quatre chansons françaises. An illustration of how carefully calibrated everything is here comes with two Debussy pieces, Clair de lune and "Pour remercier la pluie" (from the Six Épigraphes Antiques), arranged for orchestra from other media. These serve as entr'actes between the sections of Piau's program, and they should by all rights have been annoying: aren't there enough genuine orchestral pieces that could have filled the bill? But just listen. These fit into the patterns that run through the whole album, and they make perfect sense, just like everything else. Piau's voice is delicate, soaring, and richly beautiful; one of the miracles of the current scene is its durability and versatility. Her support from conductor Jean-François Verdier, leading the Victor Hugo Orchestra, is confidently smooth, never intruding on the spell Piau weaves. A magnificent orchestral song recital that made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo

Violinist Daniel Hope's publicity for this 2024 release promotes it as "[t]racing the history of Western dance from medieval times to the 20th century." It is true that the double album includes music of many eras, from traditional pieces to the 20th century, but this formulation fails to capture the mood achieved here by the always crowd-pleasing Hope. All his selections are short, and for the most part, they jump across the centuries rather than being chronological. Hope both plays and conducts the Zürcher Kammerorchester, and the overall effect is kaleidoscopic, like one of those concerts where pieces follow one another as if in a medley, with lighting effects to match. A double album of short pieces may seem a lot, but this is Hope's point; he seeks to expose the variety of dance rhythms that course through Western classical music, in which dance is not usually thought to play a very significant role. The album is a great deal of fun, with Hope alternately picking up his violin and laying it aside and veering from Baroque dances to Florence Beatrice Price's jazzy "Ticklin' Toes" (it is good to hear her music showing up on non-U.S. releases). In the end, the energy in this big group of 42 pieces never flags.© James Manheim /TiVo

For his new recital published on the Decca label, Benjamin Grosvenor has chosen Franz Liszt, whose music has followed him since his childhood thanks to his grandfather's initiation. Dedicated to the pianistic monument that is the Sonata in B minor, the English pianist's programme aims to bear witness to the various aspects underlying the Hungarian composer's creation with emblematic compositions (Petrarch's Three Sonnets), original ones (Lullaby), as well as the extraordinary power of re-creation that Liszt distilled in his paraphrases; here we find the Reminiscences of Norma after Bellini and his arrangement of Schubert's Ave Maria.Every concert and every recording of Grosvenor's music is long awaited and desired, so rich is his personality and his extraordinary pianistic mastery. His recent album devoted to the Frédéric Chopin Concertos confirmed the pre-eminence of this pianist within a well-to-do brotherhood.His vision of the famous Liszt Sonata is immediately among the most inspired. Like a bird of prey, Grosvenor knows how to wait for the right moment to pounce on the chords with diabolical precision and contained rage, in a dramatic Mephistophelian tension. At the same time, the fluidity of his piano opens the door to the twentieth century and particularly to Ravel's world so dependent on the Liszt lesson. It is known that Brahms had fallen asleep when Liszt played his Sonata to him after a probably drunken dinner. Nothing probable here with this powerful evocation of life and death. Magisterial! © François Hudry/Qobuz