New Recordings

There have been a flurry of very appealing new recordings released in recent months and I am going to have a listen to some of them and review them in this space. Yes, I know, in the past I have disdained doing reviews of new releases, but frankly, that was mostly because they didn't seem that interesting. These new releases are a whole 'nother thing. The first one I am going to get into is from Daniil Trifonov. It is not his latest, which is a Bach program that probably recapitulates the program he gave in Salzburg in August that I attended. This is an older release: Silver Age, which contains Russian music from the first half of the 20th century, a particularly rich era. Here is the program:

A dream program with dream artists, so I am looking forward to that one. But before that, another two disc set is likely to arrive (yes, I prefer to own CDs) and that is this one:

I already have two recordings of the Shostakovich preludes and fugues so I might be able to do some interesting comparisons. Another recording I would love to review is by up and coming mezzo Lea Desandre:

But alas, that is out of stock already. I already posted a video of one selection from the album, a duet with Cecilia Bartoli. There are other samples at YouTube, but it seems the only one I can embed here is the one I already did. So here it is again:

UPDATE: Amazon just informed me that my order of the Trifonov album is coming from the UK via Royal Mail and will arrive sometime in November. Probably. Isn't that a bit weird?