31st July 2017

Awards, Gramophone Awards 2017 shortlist

by Chris O'Reilly

Gramophone Awards 2017 shortlist The six dozen recordings shortlisted for the 2017 Gramophone Awards (which celebrate their fortieth anniversary this year) has just been revealed; the top three in each category will be announced on 16th August, and the ceremony itself will take place on September 13th in London.

You can browse Gramophone's devoted digimag featuring full reviews of all 72 shortlisted titles here.

Baroque Instrumental

'A fresh, zinging tone alive with vitality and enjoyment, an effortless easy panache from both ensemble and soloists...underpinned by a scholarly attittude to programming and performance style which is yet worn with a light grace.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Esfahani obviously revels in [the harpsichord's] capabilities...His sophisticated virtuosity, stylistic aplomb and strong personal profile give fresh and meaningful voice to this well-travelled score.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'French-style dances lilt, sway or scamper, with a keen attention to charismatic details (the pair of Passepieds is an ideal compound of liveliness and refinement.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Biondi’s classy playing ensures that they are attractive listening. Clear, sweet-toned and generously bowed, it does not over-complicate matters with fussy articulation or effect.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Solomon takes centre stage...but my ears were drawn equally to the sympathetic continuo-playing of theorbist David Miller and harpsichordist Terence Charlston.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC

'These are performances that burst with life, and right from the unaccompanied sparring between the soloists at the beginning of the first track.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Baroque Vocal

'The dominant virtue in this fine collaboration between the outstanding Davies and Arcangelo lies in an unsentimental perspicacity, reassuring in its intelligence and deep sensitivity.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'A thoughtfully moulded, expertly executed and deeply committed reading...I believe it to be one of [Gardiner's] finest achievements.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'An assured synthesis of elegant musicality, judicious ear for contrapuntal detail and informed scholarship...New College’s famous choir is in very good hands.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'These works have been recorded many times but rarely so well. Rousset’s vision for his ensemble... is sublime, as too are his harpsichord realisations. This is a landmark recording to treasure.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'In every way, a fitting end to their journey...the vivid atmosphere of Agnew’s performance is palpable and, as so often in these discs, his text-driven subtlety wins over.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Texts are declaimed crisply yet sensitively, melismatic vowels possess compassionate luminosity, and plangent contrapuntal contours illuminate Scarlatti’s harmonic chiaroscuro.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Chamber

'The Danish are remarkable, as ever – capable of intense blend, extreme dynamic variation (in which they seem glued together), perfect intonation even on harmonics, and constant vitality and flow.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'A compelling portrait of a powerfully original creative spirit...the whole group seem to understand this life-affirming music from the inside.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC

'Quatuor Diotima couldn’t play an affected, emotionally over-ripened note if they tried.Their vision...views the backdrop of Romanticism...as a starting-shot rather than a point of reference to be dwelt over too obsessively.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC

'The Nash ensemble have a natural feeling for the music's ebb and flow, and while they're not afraid of big gestures and the bite of horsehair and rosin, they play beautifully as an ensemble.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Even in a work as well known as the Quartettsatz they lend character through elasticity of phrasing, which nicely counterbalances the piece’s inherent energy.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'I never would have thought of putting these two works together, but in this group’s hands it has resulted in something wonderful.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Choral

'The Marian Consort’s background in early music pays dividends in their superb precision of pitch, impeccable rhythmic placing and beautiful diction.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Niquet brings fresh artistry and specifically French authority honed over decades with Le Concert Spirituel to both works. For me, this is a prize-winning disc.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Jennifer France is in radiant voice and narrator Joshua Ellicott's refreshingly natural delivery of the English text is most empathetic...this stimulating collection deserves every success.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'McCreesh and his massed Anglo-Polish forces have given us a Seasons that thrillingly catches both the work's bucolic exhilaration and its invocations of the sublime. And for sheer sonic splendour it's in a class of its own.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'The choir are well drilled and the two female soloists are matched as well as any on disc...Suzuki is no speed merchant, and maintains the through line in more strenuous movements.'

Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'It is a magnificent rendition, showing just how this masterpiece has been convincingly absorbed into the wider choral tradition, and I recommend it very highly indeed.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Concerto

'Her interpretation [of the Adams] is technically beyond reproach and musically imaginative. What makes this recording indispensible is the coupling...Harris’s Concerto is a major (re-)discovery.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'If Driver offers a robust, muscular view of the Beach, he is certainly in touch with his feminine side in the highly attractive single-movement Concerto by Dorothy Howell.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'They demonstrate wide variation in tone and character...Hadelich’s Tchaikovsky is lean...his Lalo bursts with character. There is plenty of beef here.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC

'These wonderful performances have the air of chamber music, of close listening between soloist, band and director...[a] thought-provoking and eminently enjoyable cycle.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Notable for the soloist’s exemplary clarity and the orchestra’s alternately lusty and sensitive playing...On the last page, Tharaud and Vedernikov decide to share the battle honours and storm home as equal partners to thrilling effect.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Everything feels ‘in the moment’, a quality of improvisation like music created in the playing of it. Her musicality always comes with an element of surprise...This is concerto-playing of the very highest order.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'This is an excellent recording all round, with the LSO responding superbly well to the many technical and expressive challenges posed in performing Adès's orchestral music.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'The Bavarians’ playing is special…Aimard is as strong an advocate as always [in Le désenchantement du monde], and Murail devotees should not hesitate.'

Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC

'The SWR Symphony Orchestra, Baden-Baden and Freiburg, is in fine form, from delicately tolling tubular bells via Bergen woodwind lyricism to immense brass chords.'

Available Format: CD

'Crane’s music does so much with so little. The gestures are frank and ambiguous, bemused and sincere, self-deprecating and alert, unadorned and unpretentious.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC

'[The Rihm] packs a remarkable series of moods into its 15 minutes…it is sumptuously played, and Rihm gives the soloist space for that, in language that is comfortably aristocratic.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'The work's impact is immeasurably heightened by the exceptional performance it receives here…Christopher's adoration of MacMillan's Stabat Mater radiates out of every moment of this compelling performance.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Early Music

'The Orlandos sensibly espouse the music’s rough edges (as in the Kyrie Cuthberte), courting roughness themselves in a good cause.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'It is a testament to Werts's emotional immediacy that this album is one of their (Stile Antico's) most engaging recording; polyphony to grab one's attention rather than to carpet a devotional daydream.'

Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Phantasm’s performances are totally convincing and absorbing...their acuity to the music’s ever-active emotional flux leaves them unafraid to use forceful gestures of articulation and dynamics to make a point.'

Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'These are all top-rate singers with pure and excellently focused voices: every one of them appears here as a soloist in one of the duet sections, and the intonation and ensemble are beyond reproach.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC

'Guyot emerges from this disc as a marvellously fluent composer...Even by the best standards of today their ensemble, balance and intonation are beyond reproach.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'A new recording of Machaut’s Mass is always an event, and this one is compelling and provocative in equal measure...so many of [the] details will surprise, startle and perhaps infuriate.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC

Instrumental

'As we expect from Perahia, everything sounds natural and inevitable. Ego doesn’t come into it: rather, he acts as a conduit between composer and audience with a purity that few can emulate.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Her detailing is one of the aspects that makes this performance so compelling, be it the bringing out of a new line in the repeat, subtle changes in phrasing, a touch of pedal – examples are to be found in every single variation.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC, Hi-Res+ FLAC

'Right from the first track, you encounter a very original approach...[The 14 Bagatelles] are played with a sensitive touch and much tonal imagination.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'An ideal realisation of these exquisite dances, the likes of which I never dreamt of hearing...these performances are the most beautiful and strikingly original I’ve heard.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Trifonov’s is the best kind of virtuoso playing, where one is hardly aware of the notes being played, allowing one to simply bask in the genius of Liszt’s musical narrative and the transcendant execution of an awesomely gifted pianist.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'As an assemblage it is convincing, companionable, persuasive, hugely intelligent, unpredictable, totally without cliché. I know I shall always want to listen to Anderszewski.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Opera

'This is a finely honed production that follows its premise to an absurdist conclusion with slick theatricality and dispassionate zeal...All sentimentalism is banished here.'

Available Format: DVD Video

'It's beautifully acted and sung. Rice wrings your heart throughout and her self-lacerating final scenes have a harrowing immediacy.'

Available Format: Blu-ray

'It's beautifully acted and sung. Rice wrings your heart throughout and her self-lacerating final scenes have a harrowing immediacy.'

Available Format: DVD Video

'Singing of great authority from a uniformly fine, if unfamiliar cast...It’s a heady, enthralling experience, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.'

Available Formats: 3 CDs, MP3, FLAC

'Speech and song are seemlessly integrated here, maintaining both dramatic tension and consistency of characterisation throughout. It's hard to imagine a better bicentenary tribute: do listen to it.'

Available Formats: CD + Book, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Orchestral

'The orchestral playing is breathtaking in its accuracy -the sort of Haydn playing you dream of…this may well become the period-instrument Haydn cycle by which all others are measured.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'You may be surprised by Thomas Dausgaard’s force and conviction as a Mahlerian. This exceptional issue from the Pacific Northwest ought to be a game-changer for all concerned.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Nelsons is spry and precisioned and his insistence on super-keen rhythm pays off big-time...The Fifth Symphony is quite marvellous...and should dominate the catalogue for a long time to come.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Vänskä’s Sibelius is all about clarity – of rhythm, of texture, of intention. It is zealously unfussy and entirely without exaggeration. But it can stop you in your tracks.'

Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'The RLPO play their socks off and must rank as one of the finest ‘Russian orchestras’ in the UK today...I commend Petrenko’s as the finest modern cycle of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies currently available.'

Available Formats: 2 CDs, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Bychkov’s Russian roots make him mindful of Tchaikovsky’s classicism, the emotion always ‘contained’ until it can be contained no more.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Recital

'In War & Peace finds DiDonato back on Baroque ground for the first time in a while, and it’s a joyful musical homecoming...Drama, as ever with DiDonato, is everything. Ornamentation serves narrative first, ego second.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'The disc’s principal pleasures lie in the rarities, where we also find Prohaska at her most beguiling...and the orchestral playing has great fluency and charm throughout.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'It’s a lovely programme...Clayton’s tenor has been getting steadily stronger and more muscular over the past few years, and there’s more evidence of that here.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC

'Fritsch’s Mozart is a sheer delight. This is no bland essay of the usual suspects painted in anonymous colours but a vivid portrait gallery of characters that Fritsch has actually played on stage.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Any recording of Purcell songs enters a crowded market but Sampson makes a strong case for her contribution, with just a little help from some starry musical friends.'

Available Format: CD

'Anybody who has seen Lemieux in Baroque opera will know how she can shine thanks to the combination of an imposing voice and a lively personality.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Solo Vocal

'The voice is rich, generous and vibrant, big but beautifully controlled, impeccably smooth throughout its range. It’s the sort of instrument you could listen to all day.'

Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'The interpretations are suffused with a gentle intelligence, an instinct for unforced but direct communication and what feels like a real love for the repertoire.'

Available Format: CD

'It’s music that’s very well suited to his voice: grainy and gentle and with that characteristic burnished-mahogany tone...this is supremely seductive Lieder singing.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'This is exceptional Lieder singing, fusing line, text and dynamics into an indivisible whole, all of it delivered with a conversational intimacy that is often breathtaking.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'Mauro Peter has the kind of Dichterliebe voice I hear in my mind’s ear: fresh, youthful, evenly produced, with mellifluousness balanced by a touch of metal.'

Available Formats: MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

'An impressive if idiosyncratic programme...Rautavaara seems to have wanted to reflect Sibelius’s broad stylistic range from full-blooded Romanticism to gnomic modernism.'

Available Formats: SACD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC

Chris O'Reilly - Chief Executive

Chris grew up in London and studied cello from the age of 5. He never did enough practice to get really good at it, but caught a passion for Classical music which would stick with him forever. He has wide ranging musical tastes, still plays Chamber music and particularly loves Mahler.

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Awards, Gramophone Awards 2017 shortlist

Baroque Instrumental

Baroque Vocal

Chamber

Choral

Concerto

Early Music

Instrumental

Opera

Orchestral

Recital

Solo Vocal

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