Fanfare’s January/February 2024 issue features a rave review for Sergei Kvitko’s Schubert by Candlelight recording: “For every dozen pianists who record Schubert’s evergreen Moments musicaux and Impromptus, there is rarely one who plays with the presence and artistic maturity of Sergei Kvitko. There are stretches of this live recital from Madrid in 2022 when Kvitko’s depth of expression evoked echoes of classic Schubert pianists on the order of Edwin Fischer and Artur Schnabel. It isn’t surprising that…
Join Reference Recordings in congratulating Doug MacLeod on his two nominations (Acoustic Artist of the Year, and Acoustic Album – Raw Blues 1) for the 2024 Blues Music Awards presented by the Blues Foundation! The Blues Music Awards brings together Blues performers, industry representatives, and fans from all over the world to celebrate the best in Blues recordings and performances from the previous year. The BMAs are generally recognized as the highest honor given to…
Mark Donohue of Soundmirror has been nominated for the GRAMMY® Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical for his work as engineer and mastering engineer for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra album Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 & Schulhoff: Five Pieces (conducted by Manfred Honeck)! Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 & Schulhoff: Five Pieces REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, in a significant new interpretation from conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. It is coupled with Erwin Schulhoff’s Five Pieces, newly arranged for…
The September issue of BBC Music Magazine features a fantastic look at Janáček’s Sinfonietta from Terry Williams and includes a list of his Best Recording of the work for the “Building A Library” series, in it is Reference Recordings’ very own recording from José Serebrier and the Czech State Philharmonic, Brno. This is actually the second work from this recording to land on BBC Music Magazine’s “Build A Library” series as the album was also…
The Hermitage Piano Trio’s Spanish Impressions gets a marvelous review in the Gramophone Magazine Awards Issue: How savvy to begin a programme of Spanish piano trio works with Enrique Arbós’s Three Pieces, Op 1, particularly with its boisterous opening Bolero. The Hermitage Piano Trio give their all, serving up liberal doses of idiomatic rubato and heel-kicking accents. …Note, too, cellist Sergey Antonov’s almost viola-like sonority above the staff and the utter evenness of his tone…
Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 and Schulhoff: Five Pieces is the BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Month! “Honeck’s overriding objective has been to revivify a work that in lesser hands can easily lose its freshness and originality. To achieve this, he has followed Tchaikovsky’s carefully delineated performance instructions to the letter, investing every musical phrase with a wealth of insight, detail and colour. From the outset, Honeck’s infinitely…
The New York Times published “5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now” featuring a selection of the New York Times Classical Critics’ favorite new releases and David Allen has an absolute RAVE review for Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 and Schulhoff Five Pieces recording: “make no mistake, it is a masterpiece, a dark psychological thriller that soars and scars and ends up being rather unnerving. Drawing on Tchaikovsky’s sketches…
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck’s Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 and Schulhoff: Five Pieces is a Gramophone Recording of the Month and Editor’s Choice feature! “Manfred Honeck has been Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony since 2008, during which time they have released many discs together on Reference Recordings, including several that have earned recognition as Editor’s Choice: Dvořák, Mahler and ‘Promethean’ Beethoven (as described by Richard Osborne, 12/15) among others.… And now they…
The Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos recordings from Garrick Ohlsson, Sir Donald Runnicles and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra are a July 2023 Gramophone Magazine Editor’s Choice! “whenever [Sir Donald Runnicles] and [Garrick] Ohlsson collaborate, time is never spent in conversation beforehand about tempos, phrasing or other details. They simply begin making music together and thus, in an exercise of intuitive symbiosis, arrive at their joint interpretation. The result, as heard here, is a spacious,…
The May 2023 issue of Gramophone Magazine features a must-see four-page feature on the Grand Teton Music Festival and the orchestra’s recording of the Beethoven Piano Concertos with Garrick Ohlsson and Sir Donald Runnicles. See the piece, titled “Climbing Everest in the Rockies” by Thomas May on Page 23! “To perform all five Beethoven piano concertos as a cycle is to ascend one of the repertoire’s proverbial Everest-like peaks. … a winning combination of factors…
Reference Recordings is excited to have come across a limited collection of some of our earliest recordings on LP — including our first-ever recording, created in 1976 before Prof. Keith O. Johnson began working with RR! Explore the recordings below, and make sure to look through the images as each one includes the LP Jacket with information about the backstory of the recordings. We regret we cannot ship to the EU or UK at this time.…
The Bach Aria Soloists’ Le Dolce Sirene gets a great review from Laurence Vittes in the March 2023 issue of Gramophone Magazine: “The Kansas City-based Bach Aria Soloists make their recording debut on Reference Recordings with a lovely album of Monteverdi, Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn, complemented by Cecilia McDowall and concluding with their own improvisation on La folia. Recorded with the label’s trademark sweet and clear perfection, ‘Le dolce sirene’ achieves that audiophile miracle, sounding even…
Downbeat Magazine‘s January 2023 issue has a list of their 2022 Albums of the Year, and Doug MacLeod’s A Soul To Claim has made the list! “Doug MacLeod’s A Soul To Claim, like many of his 21 previous albums, makes it clear that he’s an archetype of the top-level blues storyteller: wry, sharp-witted, virile, inclined to poke fun at sentiment.… MacLeod bestows his music with a human intimacy that’s a function of his affable personality…
The Blues Foundation announced its 2023 Blues Music Awards Nominees and Reference Recordings is excited to share that Doug MacLeod has been nominated for his 22nd Blues Music Award with a 2023 nomination for Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year! Doug MacLeod Recordings on Reference
The January 2023 issue of Gramophone Magazine features a review of Nadia Shpachenko’s recording of Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine: “Lewis Spratlan’s Invasion is a raucous, volatile tone poem for a sextet of piano, saxophone, horn, trombone, percussion and – I assume to provide some local Ukrainian colour – mandolin, written at speed in March this year.… Invasion is the music of indignation and outrage, its combative nature (it does have a more contemplative central section) mirrored…