Not only is Isabelle Faust one of the greatest violinists of our age (and perhaps all ages), but she  is also blessed with a powerful curiosity, seemingly always on the lookout for composers and  repertoire off the beaten track, as a glance at her discography will show. This collection of compositions by the eccentric genius Pietro Antonio Locatelli, is a splendid illustration of Faust's adventuresome repertoire. Locatelli's violin works run the gamut, from  staggering virtuosity, exemplified here by his Concerto for Violin in A, Op. 3, No. 11, where the  composer stretches the capabilities of both violin and violinist, to the achingly  beautiful and tender Concerto Grosso in E-Flat, Il pianto d'Arianna, Op. 7, No. 6. Faust is easily up to all the challenges posed: the jaw-dropping difficulties of the Concerto in A—including  finger-busting double stops and high notes (16th position!) played just a fraction of an inch  from the bridge—as well as the gorgeous lyricism of Il pianto d'Arianna. Also on this release are other works by Locatelli that are all striking in their originality and played with equal aplomb by  Faust and sensitively accompanied by Giovanni Antonini and his forces. © Anthony Fountain/Qobuz

The idea for the 6 Sonatas for Solo Violin Op.27 came to Eugène Ysaÿe in 1923 after attending a recital by the Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti, then aged 30, in which he performed Bach's Partitas and Sonatas. The Ysaÿe cycle was completed in July 1923, and published the following year. Its works draw on Bach's legacy while building a bridge to new forms of composition at the dawn of the twentieth century, in an effort to reflect the technical and stylistic development of the violin over the previous two hundred years. A century later, Hilary Hahn, who is currently one of the most brilliant violinists in the world and whose teacher was himself a pupil of Ysaÿe, has gifted us these Sonatas on an impeccable recording, destined to stay on as a benchmark.A choice was made to emphasise the chromaticism of the dissonances, with particular emphasis on the minor seconds. The wide range of these scores demands a plasticity and a dexterity that Hahn has delivered, the musical flow unfolding in a limpid continuum. Faithful to the composer's spirit, but at the same time imbuing it with her own personality, the violinist models the different sound planes with pianissimos you could mistake for caresses. A jewel of sound, magnified by the impeccable recording by the producers at Deutsche Grammophon © 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

The first album from the young British conductor Alpesh Chauhan is an instant Qobuzissime! When the Chandos stable signs an emerging artist, we already know that their first release will be full of pleasant surprises. Here, the Birmingham-born conductor and an ardent defender of Russian music chooses Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful pages, skilfully avoiding the overplayed The Nutcracker, Eugene Onegin and Sleeping Beauty. It goes without saying they are classics for a reason, but the rest of Tchaikovsky's repertoire is well worth a deeper look. At the head of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Alpesh Chauhan dwells at generous length on the more expressive side of the Russian composer, who excelled in the projection of heart-rending pathos. From the Overture and Polonaise from the opera Cherevichki to the fantasy The Tempest and the Francesca da Rimini suite, Chauhan displays a visionary and circumspect intelligence of the different sections of the orchestra and the sudden diegetic changes, always executed with a hallucinating fluidity. Even more fascinating is the perfect legibility of the different timbres, impeccably individualised while they maintain great coherence within the ensemble. One leaves this disc with the feeling they’ve returned from a long journey, and with the conviction that one has witnessed the birth of a tremendous conductor. Rarely has Tchaikovsky resounded with such a sense of drama or with such inflections of immensity. Alpesh Chauhan will be creating dreams for much time to come. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz

The virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin isn't the first pianist one would think of when it comes to Fauré's music, but he has recorded all kinds of things, even ragtime, and as it happens, he does quite well with the dense miniatures heard on this album. Fauré's Nocturnes are at some level connected to Chopin's but are quite different, with murky chromaticism, especially in the later ones, setting the night atmosphere. Fauré is thought of as a musical conservative, but one would hardly know it from the pieces here that stubbornly refuse to settle on a tonal center. The counterpoint is complex, and a successful performance is one that untangles it. There isn't big, pianistic virtuosity here, but Hamelin's ability to balance Fauré's registers is virtuosic in its own way. The Barcarolles, a genre not much pursued by other composers but for Fauré seeming to allow rays of Venetian sunshine into his rather closed-in French world, are lighter but basically cut from the same cloth. Things lighten up with the final Dolly Suite, Op. 56, where Hamelin performs with his wife, Cathy Fuller. (For those wondering, neither Mi-a-ou nor the Kitty-valse has anything to do with cats.) Although Hyperion's church sound is not idiomatic, it does not damage the remarkable clarity in what is a significant entry in the Fauré discography, one that landed on classical best-seller lists in the late summer of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

This recording landed on classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023, and several factors combined to place it there. One is the sensitive ensemble work throughout from the trio of violinist Veronika Jarůšková, cellist Peter Jarůšek, and pianist Boris Giltburg. Jarůšková and Jarůšek are members of the fine Pavel Haas Quartet, but the trio, as such, is quite new, and Giltburg, moreover, is better known for virtuoso repertory than for chamber music. One would never know it from the seamlessly executed conceptions and transitions, with Giltburg in no way spilling out of the texture. Another factor is the presence of the first two Dvořák trios, early but by no means immature works. Recordings of them are not common, but hear the absolutely characteristic opening of the Piano Trio No. 1 in B flat major, Op. 21, with its pentatonic melody; handled as sensitively as it is here by Jarůšková, the work is the equal of any of the later trios. Lastly, there is the fresh reading of the Piano Trio, Op. 90 ("Dumky"), one of Dvořák's most popular works. Several movements receive interesting interpretations. Consider the beginning, where the Lento maestoso designation is applied to the movement as a whole, with the opening chords kept consistent in tempo with what follows. This diverts the emotional center to the beautifully sad counterpoint between the cello and violin as the movement continues. The sound from the Wyastone Estate is warm but a bit close up, one of few complaints, and this is a major chamber music release that will yield a great deal of satisfying listening.© James Manheim /TiVo

It’s rare for a work as crucial to piano literature as Liszt’s “Sonata in B Minor” to be submerged beneath the thematic title of an album rather than being presented as its primary sales pitch. Yet the great pianist Igor Levit clearly knows what he’s doing. Titled Fantasia, his new double album on Sony Classical is dedicated to pieces that escape all formal frameworks, covering a period of almost two centuries from 1720 to 1910. His program begins with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which single handedly galvanised a good part of Western classical music, finishing with Franz Liszt, Alan Berg, and Ferruccio Busoni, all three of whom cite Bach in their works, the first two having composed sonatas that rely more on a “Fantasia” than on a precise form. This freedom of composition is the common thread of this fascinating program that comprises in one fell swoop Bach’s exceptional “Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue” and Ferruccio Busoni’s monumental “Fantasia contrappuntistica,” to which Levit responds with renditions of Siloti, Liszt, and Busoni. With his soft and supple sonority, Igor Levit is above all an introspective musician who doesn’t try to make an outrageous demonstration of Liszt’s sonata, haunted by Goethe’s Faust, nor does he do so with that of Alban Berg, whose twelve-tone writing doesn’t burn bridges with music history. With his unique imagination and emotional depth, Igor Levit takes us on a fascinating interior journey through time periods and innovative styles whose timeless and expressive forces never stop compelling us. © François Hudry/Qobuz

The phenomenon of a long traditional connection between an orchestra and a repertory occurs less often in the U.S., where orchestras have had to be generalists, than it does in Europe. However, an idea of the flavor can be gained by considering performances of Rachmaninov by the Philadelphia Orchestra, which date back to the composer's years in the U.S.; he conducted many of his works himself, and the performances led by Leopold Stokowski and later Eugene Ormandy were imbued with his spirit. Listeners have been delighted to find that the tradition continues with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led the orchestra since 2012 and shows every sign of shaping it into an ensemble for the ages; the album landed on classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2023. The fabled Philadelphia strings are in top form here, and Nézet-Séguin exploits them in a display of full-blooded sentiment, fully controlled. He adds portamento to the string lines in the last two movements of the Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27, and the strings respond naturally, but it is not just the string section. Sample the delicate wind work at the beginning of the Adagio second movement of the Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44, which receives the right feel of mystery. Deutsche Grammophon's engineers add appropriately lush sound, working in Philadelphia's Verizon Hall, in a recording that sounds like a classic in a very crowded marketplace for these works.© James Manheim /TiVo

Violinist Isabelle Faust and fortepianist Alexander Melnikov have been accumulating a catalog of distinctive historical performances of Schumann. Here, they turn to the composer's most famous chamber works, the Piano Quartet in E flat major, Op. 47, and Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op. 44, bringing on board violist Antoine Tamestit, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, and violinist Anne Katharina Schreiber in the Piano Quintet. Despite the common key and the fact that the two works were written just a few weeks apart, they're quite different, and one strength of these performances is that the players catch the difference. The Piano Quartet is quiet and inward, with Faust's "Sleeping Beauty" Stradivarius purring in the opening Sostenuto assai passage. The slow movement of this work gets a performance of rare lyricism here. The Piano Quintet looks forward to a more public, orchestral kind of chamber music, and the players succeed in transforming the entire sound environment of the music, aided immeasurably by Harmonia's engineers. The music was recorded at the small hall of the German federal youth music academy in Trossingen, and this is a superb space for the music. Of interest far beyond historical performance circles, these are wonderful performances of Schumann's major chamber works.© James Manheim /TiVo

Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"), and Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 35 ("Funeral March"), are both recorded with great frequency, although rarely, if ever, on the same album. The pairing may have been one factor that put this release by pianist Beatrice Rana on classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2024, and another may well have been this young pianist's undoubted charisma. Rana is inventive in finding a thread that connects the two works. Both pieces are technically difficult, the Beethoven especially so, and pianists have responded with heroic, monumental frameworks and fireworks. Rana does something different. Her slow movement in the Beethoven is very tender, deliberate but not ponderous, with a sense of tragedy to match the Chopin Funeral March. In general, she tends toward detail rather than thundering piano, and there are many fresh insights in her interpretation. Her outer movements in the Chopin have a skittery quality, as if the tragedy marked by the Funeral March has created a sense of dissociation. In the Beethoven, she teases out contrapuntal lines that are obscured by blazing readings, bringing her fugal finale closer to the variation finales of the Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, and Piano Sonata No. 32 in C major, Op. 111, in mood. It is a fresh album from an artist who has thus far offered less imposing fare, and it is well recorded at the Parco della Musica Auditorium in Rome.© James Manheim /TiVo

The Sibelius Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63, is a classically gloomy work, received coolly by its original audiences even though the composer was enormously popular. Sibelius wrote it while suffering from throat cancer that could easily have killed him; as it happened, surgery was successful, and he lived for another 46 years. It is generally taken to exemplify a peculiarly deep kind of Nordic gloom. Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali has gained quite a reputation for shaking up conventional interpretations, and interested listeners put this album on classical best-seller lists in early 2024. Here, he delivers more of the same, with a reading of the Fourth that is nervous and even a bit action-packed rather than gloomy. His performance is actually slightly slower than average, but it doesn't seem like it with all the little climaxes Rouvali inserts into the work. It is almost as if he is coming down on the side of the Sibelius contemporaries who argued for a hidden program in the symphony, something Sibelius himself denied. It is not a typical Sibelius Fourth, but it is intriguing, and the Gothenburg Symphony follows Rouvali effectively through unknown territory. In a work that does indeed have a program, The Wood Nymph, Op. 15, Rouvali offers a highly persuasive performance. He closes with a familiar work, the Valse triste, Op. 44, No. 1, but here again, he pushes the tempo; it is not an encore-type Valse triste. It is hard to know what to think of Rouvali's readings; perhaps he will set new standards, or perhaps they will be interpretational blips. Sample and decide.© James Manheim /TiVo

“I breathe in the air of other planets.” It’s with these words of German poet Stefan George, put to music in the “String Quartet No. 2 Op. 10,” that Arnold Schönberg takes leave from Western tonal harmony. Composed from 1907 to 1908 during a very painful period of his life, marked by the composer’s separation from Mathilde Zemlinsky, the work signifies a turning point in the history of European composition. As the centrepiece of the moving Infinite Voyage, this farewell music certainly wasn’t chosen at random by the legendary Emerson String Quartet, as the New Yorkers present us with their last album before retiring after 47 years of loyal and dedicated service.   For the occasion, the quartet called upon a longtime accomplice, the marvelous Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, who had long been separated from this type of repertoire. Together, they pursue their exploration of Germanic repertoire with Paul Hindemith’s very beautiful early work “Melancholie Op. 13,” a completed cycle of melodies from Ernest Chausson’s postromantic “Chanson perpétuelle” (with Bertrand Chamayou on the piano), and with Alban Berg’s “String Quartet No.3.” On the theme of collaboration, Infinite Voyage delights the listener with its vibrant and harrowing sensuality, in which the bond between the singer and the quartet is clearly heard. They are the ideal performers of music of such mysterious complexity. For the Emerson Quartet, we couldn’t imagine a better farewell opus. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz