Claudio Mutti

It's a recording that just a few years ago would have been mainstream: a "name" pianist (albeit one much less well known in the U.S. than elsehwere), who has been playing Mozart's piano concertos since childhood, joins forces with a name conductor with whom she has frequently collaborated, leading a modern-instrument orchestra of some 70 players, with the results released on a major international-conglomerate label. Now it's distinctly unusual. But lo, there's value in the old ways. Portuguese-Brazilian pianist Maria-João Pires is a lifelong Mozart specialist, but she still has new things to say in two of Mozart's most popular piano concertos. You can chalk it up to her Buddhist outlook if you like: her readings of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595, and Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, might be described as detached without being lifeless. Her approach is most startling in the Piano Concerto No. 20, where her no-drama shaping of the material runs sharply counter to type. Sample the piano's entrance in the first movement, where it offers a twisting, tense elaboration of the main theme that is far removed from its source material. Generally pianists use this to raise the tension level, but Pires lets the unusually shaped, chromatic line speak for itself with fine effect.

The first recording of Johann Carl Bischoff's Six Sonatas for Cello performed by Claudio Ronco and Emanuela Vozza on period instruments. Johann Carl Bischoff (1747-1800) was a a German composer and a virtuoso cellist. He became a member of the court orchestra of the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau in the 1770s. In 1793, Bischoff invented a cello-like instrument, which he named the Harmonicello. The instrument had five bowed gut strings and ten sympathetic metal ones.

The world premiere recording on period instruments of Jean-Louis Duport's Six Sonatas for cello and bass, and Three Duos for two cellos performed by Claudio Ronco and Emanuela Vozza.

This Friday we will release the new album by maestro and violinist Claudio Cruz in partnership with violist Gabriel Marin!

Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal availability. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch’s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.

Christmas Blues is the third studio album and first Christmas-themed album by American singer Sabrina Claudio. It was released on November 27, 2020, through SC Entertainment and Atlantic and includes various original songs, as well as three cover songs. The album features guest appearances by The Weeknd and Alicia Keys.

The sad thing about this 2008 Deutsche Grammophon disc is not the music, which is unfailingly bright and cheerful, nor the program, which is consistently surprising and delightful, nor the performances, which are unendingly smiling and life-affirming. The sad thing about this disc compiled and conducted by Claudio Abbado called Marce & Danze (Marches and Dances) is that the Italian maestro is no longer performing or recording as nearly much he used to owing to the swift decline of his health.