Best of 2024: Classical CDs

I’m a sucker for a well-produced box set, and some of this year’s choices examples included celebrations of conductors Paavo Berglund (Warner Classics), William Steinberg (DG) and Louis Lane (Sony). The Berglund box contains no fewer than three Sibelius cycles, my favourite being the earliest one, recorded while Berglund was Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s. Other highlights include his pungent, earthy Shostakovich (try his terrifying version 11^th Symphony) and cogent performances of music by Bliss, Britten and Vaughan Williams.

DG’s William Steinberg set contains the LPs taped with the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 1960s for short-lived US label Command Classics, the remastered recordings sounding clear and detailed. Steinberg’s Beethoven and Brahms symphonies are excellent, the box also containing idiomatic discs of Gershwin, Copland and Stravinsky. Sony released a celebration of the unsung Louis Lane, George Szell’s assistant in Cleveland. We get 14 discs, Lane conducting both the Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Pops Orchestra in repertoire ranging from Bernstein to Beethoven. The rarities make this set essential listening, with miniatures by the likes of Alfén, Pierné and Enescu captured in glowing analogue sound.

BIS’s magnificent Allan Pettersson: Complete Edition is something to savour slowly, 17 well-filled discs and 4 dvds containing the Swedish composer’s 17 gnarly symphonies alongside chamber and vocal music. Pettersson’s style is difficult to define; imagine a very Nordic mixture of Bruckner and Shostakovich. Watch the bonus documentary, 1974’s Who the hell is Allan Pettersson? and you’ll be hooked.

The Hallé’s new Principal Conductor Kahchun Wong made a bold choice for his debut recording on the orchestra’s own label with Britten’s neglected ballet The Prince of the Pagodas. It’s a hugely enjoyable and lovable work, richly scored, the Hallé’s percussion section outstanding in Act 2’s extended gamelan music. Wong’s account is lusher and more romantic than Oliver Knussen’s London Sinfonietta version. You really need both. Another forgotten 20^th century ballet appeared on Chandos: Roberto Gerhard’s Don Quixote fusing Spanish folk influences with serialism to magical effect. Juanjo Mena’s BBC Philharmonic play this fiendishly difficult music with real flair.

Other discs which caught my ear included Brahms: Reimagined Orchestrations from Michael Stern’s Kansas City Symphony on Reference Recordings. You’d expect this to contain Schoenberg’s bonkers orchestral version of the G minor Piano Quinter, Stern coupling it with a Bright Sheng realisation of a late piano piece and Virgil Thomson’s beautiful realisation of Brahms’s Eleven Chorale Preludes, originally composed for organ and the very last work which Brahms completed. Performances and engineering are stunning. British cellist Tim Posner recorded Bloch’s Schelomo, Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and Dohnányi’s Konzertstück with the Berner Symphonieorchester and Katharina Müllner on the Claves label. His is one of the best accounts of Schelomo you’ll find, and the Dohnányi is a discovery, thrillingly played here.

Trio Mediæval’s Yule (2L) was a late addition to my list, a sublime Christmas album which deserves to be listened to all year round. This is a wonderful mixture of old and new, each number brilliantly arranged and sung with gusto. 2L’s production is astonishingly vivid: listen to this through headphones and be amazed.

Finally, two discs of music for two pianos.  Simon Callaghan and Hiroaki Takenouchi’s Danza Gaya (Nimbus) collects pieces by Dorothy Howell, Pamela Harrison and Madeleine Dring. There are some enchanting things here, and the performances are dazzling. Dring’s title track is a find, a guaranteed ear-tickler. And the Danish OUR label released an album of two-piano music by Carl Nielsen, the main attraction being a recently rediscovered piano duet transcription of the composer’s life-affirming Symphony No. 3. Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig perform it on two pianos, a Steinway and a Fazioli, and the results are glorious. Apprehensive about 2025? Listen to this pair’s rendition of Nielsen’s glorious finale and you’ll believe that all can be right with the world.

Here's Bernard Hughes’ pick:

I have heard lots of good albums this year, and I don’t think that it is just recency-bias that makes two late-year ones stand out: NMC’s very fine portrait of Tom Coult’s orchestral music and François-Xavier Poizat’s stunning complete Ravel music for piano on Aparté, getting ahead of what will no doubt be a feast of Ravel 150th birthday releases in 2025. There are all the popular hits there, but also discoveries for me like the miniature Frontispiece, that pre-echoes 20th century minimalism in a fascinating way.

Another “complete piano works” and anniversary crossover was Lucas Debargue’s 4 CD set of Fauré (Sony) marking the centenary of his death.  It charts the composer’s progression from mid-19th century salon pieces to the profoundly odd and unsettling works of the composer’s hearing-impaired last years.

There were a number of great choral releases. Perhaps my two favourites were the London Choral Sinfonia’s Retrospect album of Vaughan Williams (Orchid), focusing on little-heard pieces like the cantata In Windsor Forest, alongside a perky reading of the Violin Concerto with Jack Liebeck. Also outstanding was Welcome Joy: A Celebration of Women’s Voices by the Corvus Consort under Freddie Crowley (Chandos), the women’s voices in question both the Corvus Singers and the (mostly) female composers, ranging from Imogen Holst – getting some much overdue love this year – to Hilary Campbell and Shruthi Rajasekar.

Album title of the year must be The Sex Lives of Vegetables, a collection of song cycles by Leslie Uyeda on Redshift Records. Maverick choice of the year must be Øyvind Torvund’s gloriously peculiar A Walk into the Future (Aurore Records) which is hard to capture in words, but I went with “weird, in a good way” or “Stockhausen, channelling Radio 2”. It’s definitely one that’s stayed with me.

Lastly, my two overall picks of the year are, first: Arthur Bliss’s Works for Brass Band by the Black Dyke Band and John Wilson on Chandos. I have become a big Bliss fan in recent years and this really hits the spot, including arrangements of orchestral works for brass band, and two specially composed brass band competition pieces. The playing is extraordinary and it’s a great listen. And second, Stewart Goodyear’s Prokofiev Piano Concertos 2 and 3, plus the 7th piano sonata, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Andrew Litton on Orchid Classics. In my review described the playing as having “sparkle but also… moments of inwardness” and the album has already gone onto my “most played” list where I’m sure it will stay.

And, from Sebastian Scotney:

On the one hand there are experiences of recorded music which stay in the mind; and on the other there are albums – sometimes current, sometimes reissues – that remain as fixtures on the turntable. This year, the two have seldom been the same thing. I was completely bowled over by Scottish mezzo soprano Catriona Morison’s consummate musicality and responsiveness in her recording of duets by Schumann, Brahms and Saint-Saens etc., with soprano Katharina Konradi and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, (C-Avi) but not by the album as a whole. Quatuor Ébène’s recording of Mozart String Quintets with violist Antoine Tamestit (Warner Classics) also has some glorious moments – I would hear the group live any time – but there were times when I wished the album had been recorded in a less cavernous, more private space than the 1150-seater Auditorium Patrick-Devedjian at the Seine Musicale. And whereas listening to the DG disc of Schubert’s F minor Fantasy in the last ever recording by Maurizio Pollini with his son Daniele (again recorded in a big hall) could not have been more moving, there are tempo choices which simply haven’t worked.

Albums I have found myself going back to again and again have been cello-dominated: firstly a wonderfully judged and flowing pair of Brahms sonatas from Christian Poltéra and Ronald Brautigam (BIS) and secondly, fine performances of the two Mendelssohn sonatas, brimming with energy, from Sol Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou on Sony. Another cellist, baroque specialist Elinor Frey, has made her eighth album for the Belgian Passacaille label: Dall’Abaco and the Art of Variation is an absolute gem.

And then there are the reissues. A January column here at TAD drew attention to Leif Ove Andsnes: The Warner Classics Edition, and to discs 30 and 31 of the set in particular, the Schumann piano trios with Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff: that has been played very often indeed. And my streaming stats tell me there is one case where I have been an even more obsessive binge-listener: as soon as the Raphael Ensemble’s 1988 glorious recording of the two Brahms Sextets on Hyperion was made available for streaming, I greeted it like a long-lost friend and – somehow, still, sorry! – it seems I just can’t get enough of it.

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