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. Find details on the Top 20 here.
While Lang Lang stays at the top of the heap with his Piano Book II, shuffling just underneath the No. 1 spot on the Classical Chartz puts Isabelle Faust and Telemann Violin Concertos at No. 2, and Alain Lefevre’s Consolation at No. 3.
There’s only one newcomer to the Classical Chartz Top Ten this week — Hildur Guðnadóttir and her enigmatically titled album Where To From, which takes a bit leap up from No. 16 to land at No. 10.
The work of the Oscar, Grammy and Emmy-winning Icelandic composer, responsible for the soundtracks of the movie Joker and the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, is familiar to many well beyond the realm of Western contemporary classical music. The nine tracks are drawn from Guðnadóttir’s personal friendships, and not surprisingly the music is intimate and meditative.
Hildur keeps a musical diary where she jots snippets of melodies that she sings into her phone’s voice recorder. It’s from those melodies and excerpts that she crafted the music for the album.
“The original seeds were planted in my phone across six or seven years,” she recalls. “After working on so many film soundtracks, it was interesting to take a completely different look at the way music comes to me. There’s a lot of space in the music that’s playing in my head, which I realised from listening to these phone recordings is the mind-space I would generally like to be in,” she says in the album notes.
Where To From is her first release on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
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