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.
The fastest rising album on the Classical Chartz Top Ten is Summer Night Concert 2025 by the Vienna Philharmonic and conductor Tugan Sokhiev, which vaults all the way from No. 10 last week to land in the top spot at No. 1 this week.
Desert, by Jean-Michel Blais and Lara Somogyi, steps down from No. 1 to No. 2, and Josh Groban‘s Gems likewise takes a step down from No. 2 to end up at No. 3.
New to the Classical Chartz Top Ten is Lorien Testard with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which made the leap from No. 12 last week to land at No. 5.
It’s the soundtrack to a 2025 role-playing video game developed by French studio Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive. In the dark world or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, set during a fantasty version of the Belle Époque (generally accepted as between 1871 and 1914), on an island called Lumière.
Every 67 years, a being called The Paintress paints a number — and each time she does so, the number is lowered. Every human whose age is equal to or above the number she paints will disappear. Each time, an expedition is sent out before the event in an attempt to kill the Paintress before she can strike again. In the story, the next number to be painted out will be 33.
There are 154 tracks on the soundtrack album, amounting to about seven hours of sound. The game has been described as a sleeper hit of the year, selling 3.3 million copies in the first 33 days.
Clair Obscur was developed by creators who dropped out of jobs in larger game studios to develop their dream project, which took about six years. Likewise, to find a composer, lead developer Guillaume Broche scoured lesser known online forums.
That’s where he found Lorien Testard, a composer and guitar teacher who wanted to work in the game industry, but had zero experience in the field. Broche loved Testard’s work on Soundcloud, where he’d posted several tracks of music for imagined games as demos.
Testard’s soundtrack includes everything from orchestral music to heavy metal, with an emphasis on melodic themes. Lorien collaborated with singer-songwriter Alice Duport-Percier to write a few of the tracks, as well as supply vocals.
The game and the soundtrack are expected to win awards in the gaming industry.
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