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.
The next two steps in the Classical Chartz switch their spots from last week. Yunchan Lim’s Bach Goldberg Variations ends up at No. 5, while French violinist Renaud Capuçon steps up to No. 4 with J.S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas.
Newcomers take up three of the remaining positions in the Classical Chartz Top Ten.
Conductor John Wilson and Sinfonia of London and their album Puccini Orchestral Works rise from No. 14 last week to land at No. 6. The album includes the Italian composer’s early orchestral works, before he rose to fame with Manon Lescaut, along with student compositions, and rarely heard excerpts from his early operas Le villi and Edgar.
It offers another side of Puccini, known today largely through his enormously popular later operas, and a glimpse at his development as a composer. Puccini studied with Amlicare Ponchielli at the Milan Conservatory between 1880 and 1883, and the album includes his student compositions Prelude sinfonico, influenced by Wagner’s Prelude to Lohengrin, along with a Scherzo, Trio, Adagetto, and Capriccio sinfonico. The latter was the work he wrote for his graduation, and includes elements you’ll hear in the opening of La bohème, which he composed about a decade later.
Le villi is a one-act opera he composed for a competition. Puccini didn’t win, but the publisher who ran the contest commissioned another opera, Edgar. While the music for Edgar is lovely, a silly plot which involves a man, Edgar, torn between his virtuous love for the pure Fidelia, and lust for the seductive Tigrana, scuttled its success. Excerpts from Manon Lescaut complete the track list.
Nemanja Radulovic’s simply titled Prokofiev makes the leap from No. 12 to end up at No. 7. The Serbian-French violinist is joined by Philharmonia Orchestra, Johan Dalene, Laure Favre-Kahn, Les Trilles du Diable, and Santtu-Matias Rouvali on the album.
“There is something wondrous in the music of Sergei Prokofiev,” says Nemanja Radulović in a statement, “as if it constantly moves between light and shadow, searching for truth through contrast, sarcasm, magic, love, irony, and beauty.”
The album includes a range of material, from the Violin Concerto No. 2 to the Sonata for Solo Violin, the Sonata for Two Violins, and the Five Melodies Op. 35bis, along with arrangements of excerpts from the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, the opera The Love for Three Oranges, and the ‘Classical’ Symphony.
Of the Violin Concerto No. 2, he writes that it was composed, “at a time of profound inner questioning, when Prokofiev stood between two realities — the Western world, where he had spent several years, and the Soviet Union, to which he was preparing to return.”
Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska and her latest release Invitation à la valse steps up from No. 15 to round out the list at No. 10 this week. The Atma Classique release takes listeners on a journey through the history of the waltz as a musical form.
The waltz, of course, is characterized by its swirling rhythm, and is linked with romance. But, from Weber to Ravel, through Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky, Fialkowska reveals the numerous variations on the theme. It can be youthful and optimistic in nature, lyrical in its beauty, virtuosic, infused with the Nordic spirit of Grieg and Sibelius, and more.
It’s a fascinating smorgasbord of waltz, a genre that is too often narrowly associated with Viennese pomp and nothing more.
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