10 releases to look out for
Recording highlights for 2020
It wouldn’t be a composer anniversary without an influx of new releases. We’ve already seen (and reviewed) many notable discs in recent issues, and there are plenty more in the offing. Pianist Fazil Say follows Igor Levit with a complete set of sonatas for Warner Classics, while Peter Hill and Benjamin Frith present the composer’s works for Piano Four Hands on Delphian. Sticking with pianists, Elizabeth Sombart joins the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 2 for Signum Classics, while Omri Epstein duets with cellist brother Ori in a disc of cello and piano works for Linn Records. There’s further chamber music, as Chandos releases a twodisc set of Beethoven’s late quartets, performed by the Brodsky Quartet. Alpha Classics, meanwhile, presents all of the quartets in the hands of the Belcea Quartet. There are several small-but-perfectly-formed box sets on the way, including Ronald Brautigam’s recordings of the complete Variations, Bagatelles and Clavierstücke, on six discs from BIS. Archiv Produktion gathers together all its Beethoven recordings by John Eliot Gardiner with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique – the 15-disc set includes the symphonies, concertos, a mass and a recording of Leonore. Similar repertoire comes on Sony Classical’s ten-disc set of recordings by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. Then there’s soprano Reetta Haavisto, who gets vocal with the Turku Philharmonic and Leif Segerstam in a programme of works for voice and orchestra on Naxos.