December 28, 2025 • 11:39 am 0
My Gramophone review of Abstractions, an album of Anna Clyne’s orchestral music performed by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony:
This engaging portrait album highlights a defining impulse in Anna Clyne’s music: to create vivid soundscapes through a symbiotic dialogue with visual art – one in which textures, forms and atmospheres are translated across disciplines…
Filed under: Anna Clyne, CD review, Gramophone
September 21, 2025 • 11:32 pm Comments Off on Les Arts Florissants: Gluck’s Paris ‘Orphée et Eurydice’
Some thoughts on the splendid new release from Les Arts Florissants:
What a delight to come upon Les Arts Florissants’s latest recording, Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice. As coincidence would have it, I’d just experienced their performance of another Orpheus story on stage at the Lucerne Festival this summer: Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La descente d’Orphée aux enfers, led by the ensemble’s founder, William Christie. Charpentier’s exquisite tragédie en musique breaks off mid-story, with Orpheus still in the Underworld and Eurydice’s fate unresolved. In its fragmentary state, Charpentier’s 1686 opera captures the stark tragedy of the myth: a descent without resolution.
Filed under: CD review, Early Music America, Gluck, Les Arts Florissants
April 1, 2025 • 1:06 am Comments Off on Review of Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony: Edward Gardner and CBSO
My Gramophone review is now posted:
Edward Gardner’s complete Schubert cycle reaches its conclusion with this fourth volume, marking the culmination of a project that began in 2018 – just as he was wrapping up his well-regarded five volume Mendelssohn survey with Birmingham. …
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Schubert
September 7, 2024 • 4:39 am Comments Off on “Last Days” by Oliver Leith
For Gramophone‘s September issue, I reviewed Oliver Leith’s Last Days, based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film riffing on Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
‘A place where flecks of magic are chipped or hacked from mundanity – where the familiar and domestic are heightened or warped’ is how Oliver Leith sums up what he wanted to convey with Last Days, his debut opera…
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, new opera
July 11, 2024 • 6:25 am Comments Off on “Urlicht” with Samuel Hasselhorn
I reviewed baritone Samuel Hasselhorn’s latest harmonia mundi release, Urlicht, for Gramophone:
Samuel Hasselhorn’s first orchestral release, this album follows his inaugural instalment of the ambitious ‘Schubert 200 Project’ (Harmonia Mundi, 11/23). Die schöne Müllerin, which won the 2023 Diapason d’Or, launched the young baritone’s collaboration with the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz to record all of the lieder penned by Schubert in his last five years, with the undertaking to culminate in the bicentennial of the composer’s death in 2028….
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Mahler
May 24, 2024 • 12:17 pm Comments Off on Editor’s Choice: “Girls of the Golden West”
My review for Gramophone of the new concert recording of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West, which has been selected as an Editor’s Choice for June 2024:
The opera repertoire would be considerably diminished if composers had abandoned their ‘problem children’ at the first sign of trouble. John Adams confronted one of the biggest disappointments of his career when Girls of the Golden West was panned by a chorus of critics at its premiere in 2017….
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, John Adams
February 29, 2024 • 7:46 am Comments Off on Philip Glass: Solo
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My Gramophone review of Philip Glass’s recent release has been posted:
‘If I’m to be remembered for anything’, Philip Glass has remarked, ‘it will probably be for the piano music, because people can play it.’ …
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Philip Glass, piano
November 4, 2023 • 1:13 pm Comments Off on Brooklyn Rider and Kinan Azmeh: Starlighter
My review of Starlighter, the latest Brooklyn Rider release featuring the quartet’s collaboration with clarinetist/composer Kinan Azmeh, is in the November issue of Gramophone:
Ever since they formed nearly two decades ago, Brooklyn Rider have been reimagining the string quartet’s potential both in their playing style and in their devotion to new repertoire. …
Filed under: Brooklyn Rider, CD review, Gramophone, Kinan Azmeh, review, string quartet
January 9, 2023 • 10:20 am Comments Off on Amanda Forsythe Sings Bach with Apollo’s Fire
I reviewed Heavenly Bach, Amanda Forsythe’s wonderful new release of Bach arias and cantatas with Apollo’s Fire, for Early Music America:
“Happiness writes white,” as the phrase goes—or, to borrow the formulation by Tolstoy that has become modernity’s default position: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Attempting to convey the condition of unadulterated joy in artistic terms is to risk a bland sentimentality; the bad news about the human condition is what sells. Part of J.S. Bach’s greatness lies in his ability to paint the full spectrum so convincingly, without compromise.
Filed under: Bach, CD review, Early Music America
September 10, 2022 • 8:18 am Comments Off on Album Review: Sarah Plum’s Personal Noise
My latest review for Gramophone is of violinist/violist Sarah Plum‘s new release, Personal Noise:
A slim discography barely hints at violinist Sarah Plum’s prolific career as a ‘new music specialist’ but confirms her engagingly adventurous sensibility….
Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, violinists
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MEMETERIA by Thomas May 