Enjoy new music with our classical music chart for this week. Our weekly selections are based on sales numbers and simply what albums we love and think you NEED to hear.
For the complete top 20, tune into Classical Chartz with the New Classical FM’s Mark Wigmore every Saturday from 3-5 p.m. Check out the full Top 20 list here.
Gems by Josh Groban hangs on to No. 1 for another week.
Next in line is the fastest rising album of the week: Yunchan Lim’s Rachmaninoff No. 3 (the one that won him the Van Cliburn a couple of years ago), which makes the leap from No. 8 last week to land at No. 2.
The top three is rounded out by UK organist Anna Lapwood’s Firedove.
There are two new albums on the Classical Chartz Top Ten this week: Simone Dinnerstein’s Complicité and Angela Hewitt’s Mozart: Piano Sonatas.
The title of Simone Dinnerstein’s release, which rises from No 12 last week to end up at No. 7 this week, was inspired by her son and his study of the French theatre practitioner, Jacques Lecoq. Locoq’s theories revolved around three concepts: le jeu (playfulness), complicité (togetherness), and disponsibilité (openness).
The idea appealed to Dinnerstein so much that she decided to attempt a Lecoq approach with her own ensemble, Baroklyn. Simone directs Brooklyn as a string ensemble from her piano. In her own notes on the album, she says,
“I’m very interested in irregularities within Bach’s music. There is so much variation in his writing, and each voice is saying something slightly different, yet all of the voices are speaking simultaneously. It is dense music to play and dense to hear. My biggest goal is to be able to communicate and hear those different voices, through differentiation of timbre, agogic distortion of rhythms, ebb and flow of tempo, and emphasis on the moments of expressive intervallic leaps and harmonic dissonances that jump out from the page.”
The album features the Cantata 170, Keyboard Concerto in E Major, BWV 1053, BWV 617, all arranged by Dinnerstein and Baroklyn, and Bach/Lasser In the Air.
Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt’s release of Mozart Sonatas, which rises from No. 14 to land in the Top Ten at No. 10. The release, on the Hyperion label, features Piano Sonatas K457, 533, 545, 570 & 576, and is the final volume in Hewitt’s complete recordings of the Mozart Sonatas on her Fazioli piano. It’s also Hewitt’s 50th release on the label.
Angela has described the Mozatian journey, including the new double-disc album, as “Endless hours of joy and wonder”. To the sonatas No. 14 through No. 18, she adds the Fantasia in C Minor, K. 475, Rondo in D Major, K. 485, Gigue in G Major, K. 574, and a few other delights Mozart (and Hewitt) fans will appreciate.
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