Romantic Era
3839 products
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Boito: Nerone
$29.99CDNaxos
Aug 08, 20258660582-83 -
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Donizetti: Il diluvio universale
$29.99CDNaxos
Jul 11, 20258660580-81 -
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Ravel & Faure: String Quartets
$14.99CDBrilliant Classics
Jan 09, 2026BRI97746 -
Wagner: Der fliegende Hollander
$29.99CDNaxos
Sep 26, 20258660572-73 -
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Schubert's Winterreise - A Composed Interpretation
$27.99CDSignum Classics
Jan 16, 2026SIGCD964 -
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Wagner: Tristan und Isolde / Stemme, Seiffert, Welser-Möst, Vienna State Opera Orchestra
Schubert: Symphony No. 7 Reconstructed / Venzago, Berner Symphonieorchester
The Bruckner Symphonies, Vol. 6 / Albrecht
This series marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, which falls in 2024. It’s dedicated to Bruckner’s symphonies, most of them recorded in new transcriptions for organ by Hansjörg Albrecht. The 7th recording was made on the church organ of Hofkirche in Luzern with the transcription of Bruckner’s 6th Symphony by Eberhard Klotz. The bonus track on this volume is the composition “Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini” for organ by the Italian composer Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini.
Brahms, Ligeti & Sierra: Horn Trios - Three Centuries / Colom, Escauriaza, Pascal
It should come as no surprise that an instrument with the horn’s peculiar sound potential and its attractive combination with two such devices as the violin and the piano has seduced classical composers such as Brahms or Ligeti. In this context, it is necessary and tremendously opportune that Escauriaza, Colom and Pascal have asked Sierra for a new work that updates the genre and enhances the virtuosity and expressiveness of the trio from today’s perspective. Thus, this disc proposes a journey from the past to the present through the last three centuries and by means of three works linked by history.
Ligeti refers to Brahms, and Sierra to both: three essential and inseparable links. Miguel Colom is concertmaster violinist in the National Orchestra of Spain. Manuel Escauriaza is hornist in the National Opera Orchestra of Paris. Denis Pascal is a famous international pianist, professor in Conservatory Superior of Paris.
Mendelssohn Project, Vol. 3 / Waarts, Treutler, Gurewitsch, dogma chamber orchestra
The third series of string symphonies by the youthful Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy marks a turning point: more and more, the rococo character that so unmistakably marked the first six symphonies recedes in favor of a deeply romantic attitude. In addition, the 7th Symphony, in four movements for the first time, is twice as long as its predecessors. The dogma chamber orchestra presents this groundbreaking composition together with the Double Concerto for violin and piano, which was composed only a little later and seems to have been written for the soloists Stephen Waarts and Annika Treutler. Waarts presents the technically demanding violin part with a melting that one does not often hear in the young generation of violinists. Treutler is in no way inferior: The pianist knows how to bring out the immeasurable richness of tone colors of the Steinway concert grand "Manfred Bürki" from 1901 to its best advantage.
The dogma chamber orchestra is much more than just an accompanist. Led by concertmaster Mikhail Gurewitsch, the strings prepare the ground for the two soloists and let the bravura solos culminate in intoxicating sound. Perfectly attuned to each other, there is no need for a conductor: top chamber music quality in symphonic garb! The seventh symphony also profits immensely from this: from the powerful unison opening to the Andante amorevole, which oscillates between melancholy and hidden dance, and the minuet, driven forward by a trenchant bass, to the brilliant fugato finale, the performance of the dogma chamber orchestra exudes esprit and enthusiasm.
Raff: Chamber Music Vol. 2 - Quartets Opp. 138 & 192/2 / Leipziger String Quartet
To mark the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth, the renowned Leipzig String Quartet presents a world premiere recording of the 5th String Quartet from Joachim Raff's much under-appreciated chamber music. In addition, the four musicians present the quartet op. 192, no. 2 with the epithet "Schöne Müllerin" - and whoever immediately thinks of Schubert is not wrong, but still on the wrong track. For unlike Schubert's, there seems to be no tragic ending in Raff's wanderer's fate, but a better one. Here, too, the young man falls in love with the miller's daughter, here, too, there is - as the title of the 4th movement reveals - "unrest", but after an "explanation" the work ends in the snappy "Polterabend" (wedding-eve party). Why Raff did not then also compose a wedding remains his secret...
While the "Schöne Müllerin" is laid out like a suite, the 5th string quartet follows the classical form. Raff had already broken away from Liszt's influence, and so the work is characterized by the extremely skillful treatment of the often catchy motifs. The fast second movement is remarkable, its familiar variations breathing Mendelssohnian esprit. Again and again, the Viennese three-fourths blossoms. Is this a reverence to Joseph Hellmesberger, the primarius of many Raff premieres? In any case, the Leipzig String Quartet's joy in this life-affirming music is clearly audible!
Boito: Nerone
Schubert: Eine Winterreise
Donizetti: Il diluvio universale
Belcke, Eckhold, Liszt & Reger: Orgelpunkt - Glocke Bremen, Vol. 2
Chopin: Works for Piano & Orchestra / Litvintseva, Mardirossian, Czech Chamber Philharmonic Pardubice
The two early concertos of Chopin are repertoire works, deservedly so, for their prodigious synthesis of virtuoso finesse and lyricism. However, the composer’s music for piano and orchestra does not stop there: he produced a quartet of standalone concertante pieces, each on the scale of his concerto first movements, which once were recorded as fill-ups to the concertos but have been neglected in recent years. The Russian pianist Ekaterina Litvintseva redresses this neglect with a beautifully polished new album of all four pieces, for which she receives warmly idiomatic support from the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Pardubice, on an intimate scale which the composer would have recognized (and preferred).
Chopin wrote his variations of Mozart’s ‘La ci darem’ as a prodigally talented teenager, a composition exercise for his teacher back in Warsaw. While cast in the popular style of its time – a grand introduction for a popular operatic melody, elaborated with pianistic sleights of hand for maximum effect, and a rousing finale – the piece is inspired with moments of originality that elevate it above contemporary comparison pieces. The Fantasy on Polish Airs and the Krakowiak soon followed, as Chopin was becoming celebrated across Europe as a new star of that new instrument, the piano. The themes in the Krakowiak are Chopin’s own,but their character is designedly Polish – mystic in the Romantic, piano-and-horn-led introduction, then sparkling with gaiety in the main Allegro. The same kind of formal balance is developed in the Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Op. 22: it opens with the kind of ethereal melody which would soon become known as inimitably characteristic of Chopin, the dreamer of the piano, preeminent master of his art in the generation after Beethoven at translating a poetic consciousness and private thoughts into the domain of music.
Brahms: Orchestral Works / Dausgaard, Swedish Chamber Orchestra
This boxed set brings together Thomas Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s cycle of Brahms’ symphonies, originally released as four separate discs. Each symphony is coupled with carefully selected works to provide a well-rounded idea of the composer’s orchestral output.
Favorites such as the two concert overtures are included – the laughing and the weeping one, to paraphrase Brahms himself – as well as the beloved Haydn Variations (on a theme likely not by Haydn at all…). Another perennial favorite is the Alto Rhapsody, here with Anna Larsson singing the solo part, but there are also less-heard works – Brahms’s orchestrations of his own Liebeslieder-Walzer for instance, and of six songs by Schubert.
Throughout the set, the composer’s Hungarian Dances run like a thread. Brahms's orchestrations of Nos. 1, 3 and 10 have pride of place on disc 1, with the remaining 18, in much praised orchestral versions by Dausgaard, spread over the remaining three discs. In reviews of the individual discs, critics used words such as ‘freshness’, ‘transparency’, and ‘urgency’ to describe the performances, with Fanfare expressing pleasure at hearing ‘Brahms from the edge of one's seat’.
REVIEWS:
Exciting in quite a different way is Thomas Dausgaard’s invigorating cycle of Brahms symphonies (with interesting additions) with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. ‘The real purpose of using a small orchestra’, Dausgaard told Andrew Mellor regarding his recording of Brahms’s Second, ‘is to allow us to appreciate all the music that’s there, so that it comes to life in every corner, rather than becoming a mesh of sound'...Dausguaard [conducts] with a sense of style.
-- Gramophone
If you are sympathetic to the ideas that Brahms’s orchestral works can be played successfully by a smaller ensemble, and that the music does not lose its effectiveness when somewhat faster tempos are used, then there is no reason not to explore what Dausgaard and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra have done here. He is an intelligent conductor who infuses his ideas with personality, and Brahms is in good, un-arthritic hands. The recordings, made between 2011 and 2018 in the Örebro Concert Hall, sound wonderful.
-- Fanfare
Donizetti: Lucie de Lammermoor
Ravel & Faure: String Quartets
Donizetti: Alfredo il grande
Wagner: Der fliegende Hollander
Liebesleid
Donizetti: L'aio nell'imbarazzo
Schubert: Fortepiano Sonatas / Yasuyo
Schubert: Symphonies, Vol. 4
Schumann: Kreisleriana & Ghost Variations; Widmann: 11 Humoresken / Pilsan
Schumann composed Kreisleriana in April 1838, at the age of 27, exactly the same age as Aaron Pilsan today : “The youthful thing that I can identify with in Kreisleriana is its spontaneity. If I had to describe the piece, I would use the German word for crazy, ‘verrückt’, which doesn’t just mean crazy, but also to be disconnected from reality. So, crazy, imaginative and intimate… There is a huge connection between these two German composers, as Jörg Widmann was inspired by Schumann’s music a lot and even his musical language is very similar, even though their styles are obviously very different. The starting point for Widmann’s music is from feelings, from the emotions and sentiments and that is where there is a similarity, but not only there. He even quotes Robert Schumann in his tenth Humoreske, taking a bar directly from Schumann’s Geistervariationen."
REVIEW:
Pilsan expresses the inner turmoil of the Kreisleriana with a keen sense of the enigmatism that is one of the secrets of Schumann’s art. He also finds the right approach in the Geistervariationen, interiorized, cantabile and supple. The melodic tenderness is never obscured by melancholy. It is in such a clear and restrained interpretation that the loss becomes clear, for this is, after all, Schumann’s last work before he was committed to a mental hospital.
Between the two Schumann works Aaron Pilsan has inserted Jörg Widmann’s Elf Humoresken, whose title refers to Robert Schumann. He succeeds very well in showing what the composer wanted: "May the interpreter discover in each of the pieces its very own tone and make it sound, sometimes mocking, then again dry, here melancholically clouded, but always with humor and subtlety."
-- Pizzicato
[Pilsan’s] artistry has evolved considerably. You have to turn to the most esteemed recordings of Kreisleriana, by Horowitz, Pollini, and Argerich, for example, to outstrip Pilsan’s performance. He seeks more balance and moderation at times than those pianists...he’s clearly to the manner born.
Reading the informative liner notes to this new release, which also includes a brief interview with Widmann conducted by Pilsan, you pick up some obvious reference points. Schumann wrote his own set of humoresques, and he freely used the expression marking mit Humor or mit guten Humor, which a postmodern composer like Widmann doesn’t take to be as simple as it looks. He takes full advantage of an emotional spectrum extended even farther than Schumann’s.
The mood is often freely tonal and Romantic, easily accessible if you appreciate contemporary eclecticism and Widmann in particular, as I very much do. Fragmentary references to Schumann abound, and in the final piece a bar of music from Schumann’s last work, the “Ghost” Variations, is directly quoted, serving as a link to Pilsan’s performance of the whole piece. The other major work on the program, Kreisleriana, was based on the fantastical Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler created by E. T. A. Hoffman. The fact that Schumann borrows the title of one of the three Kreisler novels (the last of which is narrated by his cat) implies that the music describes Kreisler’s peculiar temperament as much as Schumann’s – in the medieval sense, temperament is rooted in the four humors.
I haven’t heard other recordings of the Widmann, but Pilsan’s account seems nearly ideal in the way he merges Schumann into the contemporary texture of the music.
-- Fanfare
Beethoven: Piano Trios, Vol. 2 / Sitkovetsky Trio
With the three piano trios, Op. 1, Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with salon music and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content. From this collection, the Trio in G major, Op. 1 No. 2, appears as a cheerful and engaging work. While it has been said that one could discern ‘the master’s happy youth […] still unclouded, light and frivolous’, hints of ‘the deep seriousness and tender intimacy that would follow’ can also be found. Knowing very well that well-placed dedications could result in princely rewards, Beethoven dedicated his Piano Trio in B flat major, Op. 97, to the Archduke Rudolph of Austria, hence its nickname, ‘Archduke’ Trio. With this work, Beethoven bade farewell to the genre with arguably his most important contribution, a trio of which a critic wrote that in it ‘genius, art, nature, truth, spirit, originality, invention, execution, taste, power, fire, imagination, loveliness, deep feeling and lively jesting entwine in sisterly harmony’.
After the success of its Ravel and Saint-Saëns trios recording [BIS-2219], the Sitkovetsky Trio presents the eagerly awaited second installment of its series devoted to Beethoven’s piano trios.
REVIEW:
This is a delight: sprightly, well-articulated playing which bounds with vitality. The energy of the performance is driven by the pianist Wu Qian, absolutely attentive to all of Beethoven’s quirky markings and sudden sforzandos; the touches of rhythmic subtlety also come from the piano, just momentary holdings-back to shape a phrase or clarify a structure.
The much earlier Trio Op 1 No 2 in G is more firmly in the Haydn tradition, and has a cheery, rather rustic style; Alexander Sitkovetsky’s violin sings in the Largo, then Beethoven adds a Scherzo, before the uproariously funny repeated-note finale – not rushed here, but delivered with just the right manic wit.
-- BBC Music Magazine
Saint-Saens: Complete Sonatas
Schubert's Winterreise - A Composed Interpretation
La Passione - Beethoven, Haydn & Mozart / Landshamer, Forck, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin returns to Pentatone together with soprano Christina Landshamer, presenting La Passione, a collection of dazzling concert arias on love, longing and loss by Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn, paired with the latter’s “La Passione” Symphony. Ranging from pastoral simplicity to exuberant outrage, the program offers some of the finest vocal writing around 1800, including some of Beethoven’s rare and little-known excursions to Italian bravura opera, as well as one of the most dramatic and expressive symphonies of the eighteenth-century.
The Akademie für Alte Musik is generally seen as one of the best period-instruments ensembles of today, and has a substantial Pentatone discography, including CANTATA with Bejun Mehta (2018), Handel’s Concerti grossi op. 6 (released in 2019 and 2020). Telemann’s Miriways (2020), Handel’s Messiah (2020) and Haydn’s L’isola disabitata (2021). Christina Landshamer featured as Marzelline on Beethoven’s Fidelio (2021).
Mendelssohn: Works for Violin & Piano / Huangci, Bouchkov, Griffiths, Basel Chamber Orchestra
“Mendelssohn is a challenge, because his music appears to be so deceptively easy,” says the pianist Claire Huangci, speaking about her new album. Together with violinist Marc Bouchkov she has recorded works by Mendelssohn for violin and piano: the two Violin Sonatas in F – one major, one minor – and the Double Concerto in D minor. They are accompanied in the latter work by the successful conductor Howard Griffiths and the Basel Chamber Orchestra. As Ms Huangci points out, this represents a program rich in contrasts highlighting Mendelssohn’s artistry and the versatility of such a combination of works: “A mix requiring wit and brilliance on the one hand, while also requiring the performers to go beneath the surface and reveal a deeper meaning including sorrow, compassion and nobility, and that is something that is not easy to detect at first glance. The young Felix Mendelssohn has such a feel for the dramatic.”
REVIEW:
This is the first recording I’ve heard by Marc Bouchkov, a violinist born in Montpellier in 1991. He won 1st Prize at the Queen Elizabeth Competition at Brussels and 2nd Prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. He is an excellent violinist with a fiery temperament and a highly polished technique. Claire Huangci studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Eleanor Sokoloff and Gary Graffman and with Arie Vardi in Hanover. She is a perfect match for Bouchkov, and the two make this music exciting.
-- American Record Guide
Brahms: Lieder / A.L. Richter, Bushakevitz
On her third Pentatone album Brahms Lieder, Anna Lucia Richter returns to the German lied, making her recording debut as a mezzo-soprano with a recital of Brahms songs, together with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz. Brahms is particularly suitable for this recording debut as his songs fit the mezzo-soprano voice like a glove, and the pieces presented here range from love poetry and dark Romanticism to folk songs, including the world-famous Wiegenlied. Richter’s profound engagement and knowledge of the German lied is perceivable in each song she performs, as well as in her insightful liner notes text for the booklet, in which she links the project to the notion of twilight (Dämmerung). Bushakevitz’s poetic playing offers the perfect tone for both the gloomy and the idyllic pieces. Anna Lucia Richter belongs to the most exciting young singers of her generation. Brahms Lieder is the third fruit of her exclusive collaboration with Pentatone, after her Monteverdi portrait Il delirio della passione (2020) and her Schubert album Heimweh (2019). Ammiel Bushakevitz enjoys a flourishing career both as a solo pianist and lied accompanist, and makes his Pentatone debut.
REVIEW:
As a soprano her earlier Schubert album “Heimweh” was one of the most compelling song albums I’ve reviewed and I named it as one of my Critic’s Choice albums of 2020. I confess that I miss her lighter voice, but the change to mezzo allows her to use her middle range, where she is most at home. The choice of Brahms for her debut album as a mezzo confirms her decision.
I can name no album of Brahms songs I’ve enjoyed more than this. That is due partly to the selection of 20 of his best and most performed songs, including some of his folk song settings. Mostly it is because of Richter’s exemplary ability as a lieder singer. Pentatone’s sound quality is superlative.
-- American Record Guide (Robert A. Moore)
Chopin, Rachmaninoff: Complete Preludes / Algarra
Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 / Dausgaard, Bergen Philharmonic
After acclaimed recordings of the Third (‘Dausgaard… makes the music sound vital and even revolutionary’, Fanfare) and Sixth (‘This persuasively played work could be no better served’, MusicWeb International), Thomas Dausgaard and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra now present Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, ‘Romantic’ in its second version (1878-1880), the one with which this work has become widely known. “Nothing like this has been written since Beethoven” conductor Hans Richter is said to have declared after the successful premiere of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony in Vienna in 1881. This success finally gave the 56-year-old composer the attention and recognition he sorely needed and one can affirm that it was from this day onwards that Bruckner was actually cultivated in Vienna after years of public humiliation. Despite its nickname given by the composer himself, this symphony in no way expresses existential pain. Rather, the romanticism refers to the experience of nature – from sublime forest magic to hunting scenes – emphasized by the horn, the quintessential romantic instrument, which is given a prominent role.
REVIEW:
Dausgaard emerged early on as one of the most convincing HIP conductors of standard repertoire, and he has earned the right to express his individuality in Bruckner under normal conditions, one might say. His involvement with the score is undoubted, which makes the issue of fast tempos mostly irrelevant. Being different is worthwhile only when the difference is musically meaningful. I think that Dausgaard easily passes that test, in a Bruckner Fourth that is among the most striking in years.
-- Fanfare
