Richard Strauss Salome

Malin Byström, Katarina Dalayman, Gerhard Siegel, Johan Reuter; Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner (Chandos)

Those who experienced the mighty Peter Grimes from the Bergen Philharmonic and Edward Gardner – our Recording of the Year in 2021 – will know to expect great things from this new recording of Richard Strauss's Salome. Speaking to Gramophone's Hugo Shirley about his early encounters with the opera, Gardner said, ‘I felt like curling away from it in a foetal position. The experience was so unnerving: a stage full of characters you couldn’t identify with, you can’t love.’

In Malin Byström, Gardner has a Salome who knows the role exceptionally well (there is a recording of her Salome from 2019 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Daniele Gatti on RCO Live), which proved to be valuable, particularly in the last fifteen minutes of the opera, as Gardner says: ‘She has a really clear idea dramatically about how to pace that whole section. I found that you need to know where you’re aiming for; you shouldn’t be giving away the world with every fortissimo.’ 

Shostakovich The Piano Concertos. Solo Works

Yuja Wang pf Boston Symphony Orchestra / Andris Nelsons (DG)

Last week saw the release of Yo-Yo Ma's recording of Shostakovich's cello concertos with the BSO and Andris Nelsons, this week we have Yuja Wang playing the piano concertos, plus some solo Preludes and Fugues. These are live recordings that are virtually guaranteed to thrill with Yuja Wang at the keyboard. Incidentally, if you want these new recordings plus the complete symphonies and cello concertos in one hit, there is a 19-disc box-set which brings everything together to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer's death this year, which is worth seeking out. 

Janáček Jenůfa

Agneta Eichenholz, Katarina Karneus, Aleš Briscein, Nicky Spence, Jan Martiník, Carole Wilson, Claire Barnett-Jones, Hanna Hipp; London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)

This is the third instalment in Sir Simon Rattle's Janáček opera series with the LSO – The Cunning Little Vixen was released in 2020 and was an Editor's Choice in Gramophone. Rattle's live recording of Janáček's Katya Kabanova with the LSO was our Recording of the Month in March last year and was shortlisted for the Opera Award, with Gramophone's Tim Ashley describing it as 'utterly overpowering'. So, to say there are high hopes for this new recording of Jenůfa would be an understatement. 

Kurtág Játékok

Pierre-Laurent Aimard pf (Pentatone)

Overseen by the composer himself, Pierre-Laurent Aimard presents 81 separate solo piano miniatures from Kurtág's Játékok, dating from 1979-2022, with the longest lasting just three minutes and 48 seconds. Kurtág will be 100 in February next year, but his ear for musical detail remains. Peter Quantrill met Aimard and the producer Benedikt Schröder at a playback and patch session for the album, sessions at which the composer was often present. Aimard says about Kurtág that, ‘He is not a radical avant-gardist along the lines of others who tried to change the world. But he faced the same issues that they did, and found personal answers to radical questions in the new world – the empty page of paper, the empty page of a world after the Second World War. He goes to the borders of silence and sound, the borders of all musical parameters, and the borders of language too – sentences totally fragmented and rebuilt in the process of composition. These are all games – Játékok – that belong to the century of Kafka, Beckett, Pessoa and Perec. So we see that, in his gentle way, Kurtág faces up to the big questions of making art in a century that came close to the apocalypse. That is what Játékok does, in small and accessible forms.’

Bruckner Symphony No 9