To coincide with the publication of the May issue of Gramophone – out today – we’ve put together a Spotify playlist drawing on the music discussed in the issue. You can listen to a number of our May 'Gramophone Choice' recordings: Jonas Kaufmann singing Wagner (Decca), Julia Lezhneva singing Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate (Decca), Sir Mark Elder conducting Vaughan Williams’s Eighth Symphony (Hallé), Schubert from Maria-João Pires (DG), Tine Thing Helseth playing the Hindemith Trumpet Sonata (EMI) and Jan Willem de Vriend conducting part of Mendelssohn’s Lobegesang (Symphony No 2, on Challenge Classics).

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE MAY 2013 GRAMOPHONE SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

The cover story focuses on the music of Wagner and a handful leading Wagnerians talk about some of the key characters in the operas. In our Spotify playlist you can hear Jonas Kaufmann singing Lohengrin, Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde, Sir John Tomlinson as Wotan, Andrew Shore’s Alberich, Nine Stemme as Isolde and Violetta Urmana as Kundry in Parsifal.

Pwyll ap Siôn champions the music of Gavin Bryars in May's 'Contemporary Composers' feature and suggests the composer’s 1992 work for speaker and string quartet, A Man in a Room, Gambling as somewhere to start. Sample part of it on our playlist. And the subject of this month's 'Icons', the conductor Hermann Scherchen conducts the finale section of Schoenberg's Erwartung with the soprano Helga Pilarczyk.

You can also listen to the music-making of two fine artists who left us recently: Risë Stevens as Carmen and harpsichordist Rafael Puyana playing The King’s Hunt.

The philanthropist and founder of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, Ilaria Borletti-Buitoni discusses her love of music in ‘My Music’ and reveals that a set she couldn’t live without is the Philips collection of Mozart’s piano sonatas played by Mitsuko Uchida. Listen to the Piano Sonata in A, K331, Alla Turca.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE MAY 2013 GRAMOPHONE SPOTIFY PLAYLIST