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.
Josh Groban’s Gems fights off all contenders to hang on to the top spot on the Classical Chartz for yet another week. Remarkably, just behind it, Jean-Michel Blais and Lara Somogyi’s Desert climbs back up from No. 8 to land at No. 2. There may yet be an upset at the top of the Chartz for neoclassical superstars in the week to come…
Yunchan Lim continues to captivate, falling just one spot from No. 2 to end up at No. 3 with his historic Van Cliburn win from 2022, performing Rachmaninoff’s iconic Piano Concert No. 3. It gives his voracious fans something to chew on until his next recording endeavour.
There’s only one newcomer to the Classical Chartz Top Ten this week: Raphaël Feuillâtre and his release Spanish Serenades, which makes the leap from No. 13 last week to land at No. 9.
French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre launched his career with a string of competition wins, including Jose Tomas International Guitar Competition in Villa Petrer in Spain (2017), Kutna Hora International Guitar Festival in the Czech Republic (2017), Viseu International Spring Music Festival in Portugal (2016), Fontenay-sous-Bois Guitar Competition & Festival in France (2015), and Ciudad de Coria International Guitar Festival in Spain (2014). It was his 2018 first prize win at the Guitar Foundation of America competition (which included a 9-month international tour), and ADAMI’s “Classical Revelation 2021” that set him firmly on the path of an international classical guitar star. Raphaël was signed as an exclusive artist by Deutsche Grammophon in 2022, one of the very few guitarists on the label’s roster.
Born in the Republic of Djibouti on the northeastern coast of Africa, Raphaël grew up in the small city of Cholet in western France. It was not a musical family, but his parents recognized his gift early on, after he’d been given a plastic toy guitar at age seven.
Two years later, he was enrolled at the Cholet Conservatoire, and he continued studying the guitar alongside his high school years in Nantes. In 2020, he began studies at the Paris Conservatoire. He’s performed at some of the world’s most prestigious stages, including New York’s Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, La Folle Journée in Nantes, the Edinburgh International Festival and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, among others.
Spanish Serenades is his second DG album, offering selections by Albéniz, Granados, Llobet, Rodrigo and Tárrega. The tracks include five of Feuillâtre’s own inventive transcriptions of works for solo piano; among them, Granados’s Andaluza, performed with María Dueñas. He is accompanied by the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra and Gábor Takács-Nagy for Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.
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