Table of contents for May 2026 in Gramophone Magazine

Contemporary music emerges as a strong theme in this issue. In the cover story I write about the new album from the acclaimed guitarist Sean Shibe, ‘Vesper’. It draws together the works of three composers, Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle and James Dillon, to present a modern portrait of the instrument’s colouristic and virtuosic possibilities. Elsewhere, Hattie Butterworth sat down with Nico Muhly, a composer whose voice draws together a deep understanding of music history with our own era’s concerns to create something unique and resonant. Both Adès and Muhly actually run like threads throughout our present and recent coverage. While Hattie’s focus is primarily the new album of Muhly’s music for Magdalen College, Oxford and the collection of works resulting from his collaboration with the Tallis Scholars, ‘No Resting Place’…

Berglund takes over at Bergen Tabita Berglund will succeed Edward Gardner at the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, beginning as Chief Conductor Designate in August before assuming the full post from August 2027. Berglund will be the first Norwegian female chief conductor of a major Norwegian symphony orchestra, and the first Norwegian to lead the Bergen Philharmonic since 1985. She first worked with the Orchestra as a deputy cello in 2015. The Bergen Philharmonic was Orchestra of the Year at the 2025 Gramophone Awards. Berglund will conduct the orchestra in 10-12 programmes each season, as well as on international tours and in recordings too. ‘I am happy, proud and humble to become the new Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra … the fact I have been personally chosen by the orchestra’s…

Originally based in Los Angeles, Delos was founded in 1973 by Amelia Haygood as a recording home for world-class American musicians who were being ignored by the major European labels. Delos is named after the Greek island, birthplace of Apollo, the god of music and healing – elements Haygood felt to be closely connected. The label’s first recordings featured the Canadian harpsichordist Malcolm Hamilton (Scarlatti and Handel) and American pianist Carol Rosenberger (Chopin, Schubert and Szymanowski). Rosenberger went on to record over 30 albums for Delos and eventually took over as director of the label following Haygood’s death in 2007, when the company relocated to Sonoma in California. Delos was an early adopter of digital recording technology. Under the guidance of John Eargle, who joined in 1982, the label created…

Counterpoint isn’t just a skill or a set of rules; it’s also a game. This simple fact is often lost sight of, but it really is key to appreciating Frescobaldi’s art, and nowhere more so than in his Book of Capricci, first published in Rome in 1624. As the composer states in the preface to the volume, the name ‘Capriccio’ signals that contrapuntal rules are treated more loosely, and his wish to move beyond the ‘easier’ (actually stricter) style of his early ricercars. Each Capriccio is based on a soggetto or theme, the choice of theme ranging from the severe (the hexachord, ascending in the first Capriccio, descending in the second) to the whimsical (the two-note cuckoo motif), the learned (Josquin’s La sol fa re mi motif) to the catchy…

Dudamel departs Gustavo Dudamel leaves the Los Angeles Philharmonic this year to become the Music and Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic in September. After listening to the latest recording of Dudamel and the LA Phil, performing Prokofiev’s complete Romeo and Juliet ballet, I can hear why he is one of the most sought-after conductors in the world. Edward Seckerson’s engaging review (4/26) extols the virtues of the Dudamel and LA Phil partnership, honed over 15 years of making music together. It is a stunning recording of a Prokofiev masterpiece. Even if you own either or both of two reference recordings of the complete ballet by Previn and the LSO (12/73) or Maazel and Cleveland (9/73) you should get this one too. Dudamel and the LA Phil emphasise that…

Musicfest Aberystwyth July 18-25 Founded in 1986, and taking place against the spectacular backdrop to the southern-Welsh Cardigan Bay coastline, this music festival brings together the finest Welsh artists and international guests, with a summer music school attached, and further fringe events. The 2026 edition is built around the visionary world of the child. musicfestaberystwyth.org Aldeburgh Festival June 12-28 Conductor, composer and pianist Ryan Wigglesworth is the featured artist for this 77th edition honouring 50 years since the death of festival founder Benjamin Britten. Celebrations around Britten’s legacy include a renewed focus on developing outstanding young artists, with Wigglesworth and James Baillieu beginning a three-year tenure as Associate Directors of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme. More widely, Wigglesworth leads a circle of artistic collaborators to include violinist Vilde Frang…

Silver La Belle au bois dormant Guylaine Girard sop ..................................... Aurore/Queen Julien Dran ten .................................Prince/Knight Errant Kate Aldrich mez ................Fairy Urgèle/Dame Gudule Thomas Dolié bar...............................................................King Matthieu Lécroart bass-bar ..................................Barnabé Clémence Tilquin sop ................................................................ ...............................................Jacotte/Page/Fairy Primavère Adrien Fournaison bass ...Éloi/Grand Sénéchal/Lord Hungarian National Choir and Philharmonic Orchestra / György Vashegyi Bru Zane (BZ1064 ② • 129’) Includes synopsis, libretto and translation We’re used to Palazzetto Bru Zane unearthing forgotten French operas but in most cases we’re familiar with their composers: Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Gounod, Lalo etc. But here they unearth an opera by a composer I confess to having no idea existed until an aria popped up on Cyrille Dubois’s album ‘So Romantique!’ (4/23). Meet Charles Silver, born in Paris (1868) to parents of Russian origin. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in…

‘ Child, where did you learn to sing Mozart like that?’ Bruno Walter asked Eleanor Steber, when he first heard her. The young American soprano had recently won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air, a nationwide singing competition broadcast by NBC Radio. The prize was a Met contract, and Steber accordingly made her debut as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier that December. Walter subsequently cast her as the First Lady in Die Zauberflöte (1941), then the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro (1942), and so began one of the more remarkable operatic careers of the 20th century. Mozart was to remain integral to it, but was never the whole story. Bringing the same vocal brilliance and dramatic commitment to all that she did, Steber sang Verdi, Wagner, Puccini and Strauss…

David Threasher on The Creation in French with Julien Chauvin: ‘The performance is all one might expect: go-ahead tempos, drama and vivid period-instrumental sonorities’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 114 Edward Breen enjoys ‘A Screenshot of Now’ by Giacomo Susani: ‘This is a rare find: a beautiful slow burner that gives up its treasures subtly’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 117 JS Bach ‘Lutheran Masses’ Masses – in F, BWV233; in A, BWV234; in G minor, BWV235; in G, BWV236 Hanna Herfurtner sop Elvira Bill contr Gwilym Bowen ten Thomas Bonni bass Cologne Academy / Michael Alexander Willens Pentatone (PTC5187 509 ② • 109’) For the ugly ducklings they were long held to be, Bach’s Lutheran Masses boast an impressive discography including the likes of Konrad Junghänel, Philippe Herreweghe and Harry Christophers among the…

Peter Quantrill reads a collection of essays on Pierre Boulez: ‘How dismissive Boulez would have been of AI in its mass usage, as a hammer without a master’ Lindsay Kemp enjoys a highly personal tribute to JS Bach: ‘The final letter salutes not a god but a composer and man whose personal flaws contributed to his artistic strengths’ Boulez in Context Edited by Edward Campbell Cambridge University Press, HB, 436pp, £95 ISBN 978-1-009-16864-9 When writing up anniversary films of Boulez for a recent Online Concerts & Events feature (A/25), I would gladly have referred to BBC films of everything from a conversation with Tippett to a stylised documentary-performance of Le marteau sans maître, directed by Barrie Gavin in 1968. John Wyver has seen these and much else, and offers tantalising accounts of…

Andrew Achenbach • Tim Ashley • Michelle Assay • Richard Bratby • Edward Breen • Alexandra Coghlan • Rob Cowan (consultant reviewer) • Jed Distler • Adrian Edwards • David Fallows • Andrew Farach-Colton • Iain Fenlon • Neil Fisher • Fabrice Fitch • Marina Frolova–Walker • Charlotte Gardner • David Gutman • Christian Hoskins • Claire Jackson • Lindsay Kemp • Philip Kennicott • Aleksander Laskowski • Richard Lawrence • SangKwon Lee • Geraint Lewis • Andrew Mellor • Jeremy Nicholas • Richard Osborne • Mark Pullinger • Peter Quantrill • Peter J Rabinowitz • Howard Reich • Guy Rickards • Patrick Rucker • Edward Seckerson • Mark Seow • Hugo Shirley • Pwyll ap Siôn • Harriet Smith • David Patrick Stearns • David Threasher • Laurence Vittes…

Dame Imogen Cooper, who has announced she is soon to retire, graces the cover of the Spring issue of International Piano. She discusses the past and the future with Jeremy Nicholas and explains why she chose to end her recording career with late Beethoven. Mark Ainley, Kenneth Hamilton and Jeremy Nicholas contribute regular columns, while the pianist Simon Callaghan begins a two-part feature exploring the practicalities of recording obscure repertoire, from discovering forgotten scores to dealing with record labels. For our Repertoire Guide, Richard Whitehouse surveys the available recordings of the Piano Sonata by Frank Bridge and recommends his favourite versions. Elsewhere, Alexander Malofeev introduces his debut solo album on Sony Classical, a programme of Russian works that is this issue’s ‘International Piano Choice’, while Murray McLachlan continues his ‘Nuts…

‘Ripeness is all,’ says Edgar in Act 5 of Shakespeare’s King Lear, giving us a pithy soundbite that both acknowledges the inevitable march of time and also perhaps that wisdom and maturity still have much to offer. It’s a mantra that has given London orchestral life some remarkable Indian Summers, such as when the 74-year-old Otto Klemperer was appointed Principal Conductor for the Life of the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1959, or the 70-year-old Günter Wand was made Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony in 1982, or in 1980 when the 54-year-old Klaus Tennstedt – all but unknown in the UK – was appointed first Principal Guest Conductor, then Principal Conductor and finally Conductor Laureate by the London Philharmonic. (Though younger on his appointment than either Klemperer or Wand, he…

ROBERT RICE Baritone, vocal teacher and arranger Born 1971 Died February 26, 2026 Robert Rice was an admired baritone, an influential teacher and vocal coach, and an outstanding vocal arranger who worked closely with many of the UK’s leading choirs and vocal ensembles over many years. Born in London, Rice undertook a choral scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge, before studies at the Royal Academy of Music with Mark Wildman. As a baritone soloist he appeared with The Cardinall’s Musick and Andrew Carwood for two recordings of Tallis’s music on Hyperion (10/13; 11/16) and his impressive vocal arrangements of a wide variety of repertoire have been recorded on several albums by The King’s Singers, Polyphony and The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge with Stephen Layton (‘Yulefest’, 12/15). Rice had a particular…

Lockdown: remember that discombobulating time? The one when most of us were embracing the difficulties of sourdough making or redecorating the living room, but when musicians were – it seems – almost invariably hard at work in practice rooms, finding time to learn the Hammerklavier Sonata or the Goldberg Variations; or, in the case of Leif Ove Andsnes, not only deep in Dvo∑ák’s Poetic Tone Pictures – which in these pages he memorably described as the ‘great forgotten cycle of 19th-century piano music’(A/22) – but also finally getting his fingers and brain around Geirr Tveitt’s 29th Sonata. Which is, if you don’t know it, quite a piece! ‘The lockdown didn’t feel that creative to me – I have kids, after all, so it was complicated. But after a while I…

Aix-en-Provence Festival July 2-21 Built this year on the theme In Quest of Humanity, France’s principal opera festival is presenting six new productions, including Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte from director Clément Cogitore, with Leonardo García-Alarcón conducting Cappella Mediterranea and a cast starring Ying Fang and Sabine Devieilhe. There’s also Barrie Kosky’s Die Frau ohne Schatten with Michael Spyres and Nina Stemme; and the premiere of Francesco Filidei’s Accabadora. Recitalists include tenor Karim Sulayman with guitarist Sean Shibe, and soprano Sonya Yoncheva. festival-aix.com Festival d’Auvers-sur-Oise March 12 – September 11 Celebrating its 45th anniversary this year, this event presents a season of wide-ranging weekend concerts featuring both major names and rising talent. Most concerts take place in its picturesque Parisoutskirts host village, but not all, and one highly anticipated 2026 highlight sees…

Click album covers to buy CDs and downloads or to stream all our featured recordings Richard Osborne surveys Bychkov’s Mahler set with the Czech PO: ‘A set good enough to remind us that this thrice-exiled, multi-faith musician of genius is a symphonist for all ages’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 76 Pwyll ap Siôn is impressed by Arvo Pärt symphonies from Iceland: ‘The most revealing aspect is the way Ollikainen shifts and shapes symphonic time’s larger dimensions’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 78 Bax Holst Bax Tintagela Holst The Planets, Op 32b London Symphony Orchestra / Sir Antonio Pappano LSO Live (LSO0904 • 70’) Recorded live at the Barbican Hall, London, b September 12,a December 15, 2024 Antonio Pappano embarked upon his inaugural season as Chief Conductor of the LSO with this high-octane performance…

Lindsay Kemp enjoys Pierre Gallon in early English keyboard music: ‘The lyrical eloquence and loving textural clarity of Gallon’s playing serves it perfectly’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 104 William Yeoman on Giulio Cecchi in Julian Bream transcriptions: ‘Cecchi proves himself, as Bream did, a true artist by virtue of his sensitivity to the latter’s orchestral sensibility’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 107 Adès Birtwistle Dillon ‘Vesper’ Adès The Exterminating Angel – Habanera. Forgotten Dances Birtwistle Berceuse de Jeanne. Beyond the White Hand: Construction with Guitar Player. Guitar and White Hand. Je suis aussi. Oockooing Bird. Sad Song. Sleep Song Dillon Twelve Caprices Sean Shibe gtr Pentatone (PTC5187 518 • 65’) Composers know how difficult it is to write for the guitar without sounding Spanish. In one of two hefty booklet notes to this…

Neither love nor money could obtain a ticket for me last November, when Le Balcon and Maxime Pascal continued their project to stage the Licht cycle of Stockhausen with a performance of Montag (Monday) in Paris. The blow was softened somewhat by turning up films of two previous instalments, Donnerstag (Thursday) and Samstag (Saturday). ‘Astonish me!’ was Diaghilev’s challenge to his artists, a challenge that Stockhausen meets with, well, astonishing consistency in Licht. Each scene of the cycle is conceived for its own striking ensemble of voices and instruments, quite disparate from its companions, even within the same opera. The opening fanfare of Samstag casts us into a Berliozian inferno, where antiphonal brass groups sound a grotesque last trump. Stockhausen is telling the tale of Lucifer, just as the two…

The unforgettable Maria Tipo Her prolific concert career and dazzling technique earned her the nickname ‘the Neapolitan Horowitz’ and yet Maria Tipo (1931-2025) was a highly original and deeply devoted musician, someone who can be appreciated at different levels: as a brilliant pianist, a perceptive musician, an enterprising programme builder and an important recording artist. In the context of her Erato/Warner Classics legacy featured here, Tipo’s central achievement is Clementi’s complete run of piano sonatas (on 11 CDs, mostly recorded by Fonit Cetra during the late 1970s and early 1980s), music that in addition to its ingenuity and flamboyance (and appeal for Vladimir Horowitz) includes a number of extremely beautiful slow movements. Try the central Molto adagio sostenuto e cantabile from the G major Sonata, Op 40 No 1 (on…

‘The urge to create has deserted me. What does this mean? Am I really written out?’ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, writing to his brother Modest in May 1888, was attempting to write his first symphony for a decade. Tchaikovsky had rented a house at Frolovskoye, just outside Moscow, and was working on two compositions: the Fifth Symphony and his overture-fantasia Hamlet. Four days later, he again wrote to Modest, reporting that he was ‘squeezing a symphony out of my dulled brain’. During the early stages of composition, Tchaikovsky scribbled brief programme notes on his sketches: ‘Introduction. Total submission before fate, or, what is the same thing, the inscrutable designs of Providence. Allegro. 1) Murmurs, doubts, laments, reproaches against … xxx 2) Shall I cast myself into the embrace of faith???’ Above…

In, let’s say, the 19th century or the early 20th centuries, music played a role in people’s lives through brass bands, hymns, light opera, maybe musicals, the music hall, that kind of thing – but before the dawn of recorded music it’s obviously hard for historians to really get a sense of exactly how ubiquitous music was. It becomes really interesting to me in the interwar years – jazz, swing, dancehalls, you do get a sense of music playing a part in people’s lives. Then there’s the advent of the gramophone. Recorded music in the 1950s and 1960s – that’s the first time I think that you have music being created for a very specific market: teenagers, which did not exist before the 1930s. The creation of a new kind…

RECORDING OF THE MONTH SILVER La Belle au bois dormant Sols; Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra / György Vashegyi Bru Zane ▶ MARK PULLINGER’S REVIEW IS ON PAGE 68 Another fascinating revival from Palazzetto Bru Zane, and another discovery for most of us – Charles Silver’s opera La Belle au bois dormant, triumphantly realised and recorded. BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No 3, etc Jonathan Biss pf Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra / Malin Broman Orchid Jonathan Biss’s series pairing Beethoven concertos and modern works concludes with a superb new piece by Caroline Shaw. ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 70 SIBELIUS Violin Concerto, etc Ava Bahari vn Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra / Santtu-Matias Rouvali Alpha An expansive, exploratory Concerto from Ava Bahari and Santtu-Matias Rouvali plus a superbly performed Lemminkäinen Suite. ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 80 ‘EAST…

Podcasts This month on the Gramophone Classical Music Podcast, Martin Cullingford speaks to two pairs of composers and conductors to explore their collaborative approaches. First, conductor Sir Mark Elder and composer Huw Watkins talk about the Hallé’s new recording of Watkins’s orchestral music, featuring his Symphony No 2, Concerto for Orchestra and Fanfare, all written specially for the Manchester ensemble. And in the second episode Martin talks to composer Nico Muhly and the founder of the Tallis Scholars Peter Phillips about their beautiful new release ‘No Resting Place’, an Editor’s Choice in the April issue. Also on our Podcast this month, Martin is joined by Peter Whelan, the Artistic Director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra, to talk about his new recording on the Linn label of one of the great…

Solomon on record One of the first articles that I read when receiving Gramophone is Rob Cowan’s survey of historical reissues. It is wonderful to be able access once again classic recordings that one has had in earlier formats for decades, usually in much improved sound. In many cases a box-set containing all the recordings of a particular artist is issued only to be superseded by a later issue with maybe some additional material by the same artist. Alfred Cortot immediately springs to mind. What we have never had is a comprehensive survey of the recordings of Solomon, surely one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century whose career was cruelly terminated by illness in 1956. EMI did issue a collection of seven discs in its Profile series many…

Alina Ibragimova The brilliant violinist, who launches a series of Beethoven releases with an album of his sonatas, shares her insights into the composer’s music with Richard Bratby Jakub Hrůša The Chief Conductor of the Bamberg Symphony talks to Nigel Simeone about recording the complete symphonies of the Czech composer Martinů Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto This lyrical work dates from the final month’s of the composer’s life; David Gutman listens to the available recordings and names his favourite versions ON SALE MAY 20 DON’T MISS IT!…

◼ The most inspiring pianists from Argerich to Zimerman ◼ Expert repertoire guides Bach, Beethoven, Berg and more ◼ The best piano recordings from the past five decades Order your copy for just £14.99 today Visit www.magsubscriptions.com/great-pianists Call: 0800 137201 (UK) or +44 (0)1722 716997 (Overseas) P&P is free for UK addresses. An additional charge will be added for shipping overseas…

Marina Frolova-Walker enjoys Roslavets from the Brahms Trio: ‘All the textures come alive; the music not only breathes but even pants from excitement’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 92 Rob Cowan hears members of the BPO in Schubert’s Octet: ‘The performance blends a sense of scale with an intimacy, even cosiness, that’s part of the Octet’s spirit’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 93 JS Bach Viola da gamba Sonatas – in G, BWV1027; in D, BWV1028; in G minor, BWV1029. Violin Sonata in E minor, BWV1023 Atsushi Sakai va da gamba Christophe Rousset hpd Aparté (AP394 • 57’) Atsushi Sakai subscribes to the theory that Bach wrote six sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord, not three. These performances are so lovely that one wishes he were right, so Sakai and Rousset could have…

If the most important single event of 21st-century world history to date has been the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, then arguably its finest musical after-echo – while not the largest – is Kenneth Fuchs’s operatic monologue Falling Man (2010). This gripping 20-minute work for baritone and orchestra is based on Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel of the same name, adapted by JD McClatchy. Key to its expressive success is its focus on an ‘intimate story … encompassed by a global event’ (DeLillo), reflected by a vivid score in which one can smell the dust from the rubble of the towers’ fall, sense the aftertaste of blood as the survivor takes a swallow of water. In 2016, Falling Man was performed at the 9/11…

Tim Ashley hears Sondra Radvanovksy in Puccini: ‘Her upper registers sound wonderfully secure throughout, both in tone and dynamics’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 125 Richard Bratby enjoys an operetta album from Jonas Kaufmann: ‘It’s good that a singer of Kaufmann’s stature should be adding to the tradition of this glorious repertoire’ ▶ REVIEW ON PAGE 126 Gounod Faust Piotr Beczała ten .............................................................. Faust Marina Rebeka sop .............................................Marguerite Luca Pisaroni bass-bar ............................Méphistophélès Stéphane Degout bar ..............................................Valentin Serena Malfi mez ............................................................Siébel Isaac Galán bar .............................................................Wagner Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo mez ............................... Marthe Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Real, Madrid / Dan Ettinger Stage director Àlex Ollé Video director Xavi Bové C Major Entertainment (771108 ② 771204 • 3h 6’ • s) Recorded live, September 2018 Includes synopsis Intellect has failed Faust; the limits of knowledge…

Jazz Brought to you by Shabaka Of The Earth Shabaka Recordings Shabaka’s latest solo album is a sonic self-portrait. It’s his first proper foray into production (he performed and produced everything on the record himself) and the results are engrossing. We hear soaring saxophone lines and fiery solos full of Sons of Kemet-style riffing, wooden flutes (fragile and alone or layered in soft choirs and bird-like dawn choruses, recalling his work on Afrikan Culture and Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace) dreamy synthetic textures, wonky hiphop beats and dancing polyrhythms played by hand drums and wooden idiophones. On ‘Go Astray’ and ‘Eyes Lowered’ Shabaka also raps for the first time. His delivery is sober and introspective. He shares thoughts about the riddle of existence and the challenges of our age.…

Schumann Dichterliebe. Liederkreis, Op 39 Olaf Bär bar Geoffrey Parsons pf EMI Here we have something special. Olaf Bär, the young East German baritone who won the Walter Gruner Lieder prize at The City of London Festival in 1983 to universal acclaim, and has given two muchpraised Wigmore Hall recitals, makes his recording debut with the cycles he offered at the second of those recitals, and confirms the high opinions held of him. In performing these two well-tried works he is setting out to challenge many famous readings of the past. He meets the challenge readily with his clear, forward baritone, sensitive musicianship and fine diction. His Dichterliebe is, if anything, understated, closer to Partridge and Hågegard than to Fischer-Dieskau, and – I think – the better for it. The…

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Bolcom. Hahn. Ives ‘Rituals’ Bolcom Briefly It Enters. Cabaret Songs – Miracle Song; Waitin’ Hahn Études latines – No 2, Néère; No 3, Salinum; No 5, Lydé; No 6, Vile potabis; No 7, Tyndaris; No 8, Pholoé; No 10, Phyllis Ives Down East. From ‘Paracelsus’. The Innate. The See’r. The Things Our Fathers Loved. Tom Sails Away. Watchman!. West London Laura Choi Stuart sop Tanya Blaich pf Acis (APL78383 • 66’ • T/t) Artistry is never in question in this oneof-a-kind Ives/Hahn/Bolcom recital that challenges listeners to find their own meaning in a meeting of earthy Americana and Parisian artistic circles. The overall album title, ‘Rituals’, is a red herring for me, but perhaps informs the contemplative nature that lies at the core of these well‑investigated readings. Harmonically hazy, throughcomposed…

Last June in Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, Yo-Yo Ma paused mid-evening to pose a portentous question: ‘What is it in human nature that makes us so cruel to one another?’ Just over nine months later, in a different corner of the city, these words echoed unexpectedly during Little Willy, an outrageously brilliant pastiche on Romeo and Juliet by the Canadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett: ‘Sometimes when grown-ups are involved, kids get really hurt’; I had just read the news of the bombing of a school in Iran, my homeland. Between the poles of philosophical reflection and painful truth, Toronto’s recent musical season has unfolded, at once rich in activity and shadowed by a growing unease about the world beyond. As the Trump-imposed tariffs and rhetoric around the annexation of Canada resounded,…