Announcing Limited Edition LPs!
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.…
Italy’s Macallé Blues Reviews Doug MacLeod’s “A Soul To Claim”
Italian Blues Magazine, Macallé Blues has a new review for Doug MacLeod’s A Soul To Claim in their “Discs to Consider” section: “Doug MacLeod is one of the last and most iconic songwriters in blues that the contemporary scene can still offer. One of those endangered beings who should be preserved by some special law to protect the species and its few devotees. A Soul To Claim is his most recent album and … Despite…
Gramophone Reviews Le Dolce Sirene
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…
Audiophile Audition Gives an Ovation to Bach Aria Soloists’ Le Dolce Sirene
Audiophile Audition‘s Fritz Balwit has a wonderful overview and review for the Bach Aria Soloists’ Le Dolce Sirene recording: “The most striking feature of this opening track is the keening sound of the violin paired with a minimal cello basso continuo. This was my first exposure to the exceptional skills of the violinist and director of the ensemble, Elizabeth Suh Lane… substantial works that will appeal to fans of modern vocal recitals. They don’t lack…
Cecilia Duarte Takes Listeners through Reencuentros on WGTE Radio
WGTE Public Media in Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan hosted Cecilia Duarte to discuss her new Reencuentros album in a fantastic interview with host Brad Cresswell:
RR Spotlights — Janáček Orchestral Works
Reference Recordings has been producing albums with rich histories for almost 50 years now. Some albums were successful when they were new but are unknown to our recent customers. Some are evergreen titles, continuing to sell long after they originally came out. We’ve even had some commercial flops. As time marches on, some fantastic titles are ripe to be rediscovered by a new generation of audiophiles. And now RR would like to shine a Spotlight…
Doug MacLeod’s A Soul to Claim is a Downbeat Magazine Album of the Year!
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…
Fanfare Says Invasion is Not To Be Missed
Fanfare Magazine’s Colin Clarke says Nadia Shpachenko’s Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine is “Not To Be Missed”: “Spratlan’s music is viscerally exciting, a sonic representation of (understandable) anxiety via a preponderance of gesture. The performance is as good as one could imagine. It falls to Shpachenko to present Piano Suite No. 1 (2021), a somewhat Schoenbergian utterance, perhaps particularly in the initial “Capriccio.” Shpachenko truly understands, as does Spratlan, the expressive nature of dissonance,…
Doug MacLeod is a 2023 Blues Music Award Nominee!
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
Gramophone Reviews Nadia Shpachenko’s Invasion Release
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…
All Music Reviews Nadia Shpachenko’s Invasion
James Manheim gives 4 and a half stars to Nadia Shpachenko’s Invasion: Music and Art for Ukraine recording on All Music: “The piece titled Invasion is not a wartime dirge but a mix of elements overturned by the war, “a counterpoint of moods — between ominous undercurrents, folkloric touchstones, and a modernist ‘authorial’ commentary,” in the words of annotator Peter Yates. This work is echoed in the Six Rags for solo piano, which are not classical…
Pittsburgh Symphony’s Brahms Symphony No. 4 and MacMillan Larghetto a 2022 Recording of the Year Nominee
Pittsburgh Symphony and Manfred Honeck’s Brahms: Symphony No. 4 and James MacMillan Larghetto for Orchestra is a MusicWeb International 2022 Recording of the Year Double-Nominee! “Indisputably the finest – and possibly the most important – recording to emerge in 2022 was this release of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony by Manfred Honeck. In an age where recordings of the old war-horses are not universally welcomed, the general thought being that everything that has been said about the…
Fiona Boyes Inducted into Blues Music Victoria Hall of Fame
Congratulations to Fiona Boyes! On November 23, 2022, Fiona will be inducted into the Blues Music Victoria Hall of Fame! She also has the distinction of being the first woman inducted into the Hall of Fame. “Fiona Boyes will be the first woman even to be inducted into the Blues Music Victoria Hall of Fame on Wednesday November 23. Extraordinarily talented blues guitarist and vocalist Fiona Boyes will this month be inducted into the Blues…
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 and Stucky: Silent Spring Nominated for Engineering GRAMMY®
We are thrilled to share that Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 and Stucky: Silent Spring was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award in the Best Engineered Album, Classical category! Congratulations to engineer Mark Donahue on his nomination! “Throughout the symphony, passion is omnipresent, be it in a positive or ominous posture. Honeck unravels with his musicians to infinite perfection a modern version of a symphony that is all too…
Two 2023 International Classical Music Awards Nominations!
We are thrilled to share that the International Classical Music Awards have nominated two of our recordings in the 2023 ICMAs! The final result with all winners will be announced on January 18, 2023, and the Award Ceremony and Gala concert will take place in Wrocław, Poland on April 21, hosted by the NFM Philharmonic. Nominations Symphonic Music Manfred Honeck & Pittsburgh Symphony Contemporary Music Martin West & the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra