Gramophone

Gramophone has been the world’s leading authority on classical music since 1923. With 13 issues a year every edition will enrich your classical music knowledge with in-depth interviews and features about composers past and present, plus established and new artists from across the globe. Each issue includes over 100 reviews of the latest CDs, downloads, DVDs and books all written by our globally acclaimed panel of expert critics. Gramophone is the magazine for the classical collector, as well for the enthusiast starting a voyage of discovery. 

The trial issue features an in-depth retrospective on Schubert’s Winterreise, with input from some of the leading performers of the song cycle, including Jonas Kauffman, Ian Bostridge, Gerald Finley and Brigitte Fassbaender. 

It also includes an interview with the San Francisco Symphony’s conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas; the New York Philharmonic’s Music Director, Alan Gilbert, discusses Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony; plus we look back at the remarkable career of American soprano Leontyne Price. 

Also featured in the trial issue: we analyse the breakthrough works of John Adams, we reconsider Sir Thomas Beecham’s classic recording of Puccini’s La bohème, and we recommend the very best recordings of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2.

Please note: This is the North American edition of Gramophone. It includes all the pages of the UK edition and also a specialised 16 page supplement each issue, “Sounds of America”. This details the most exciting musical developments across North America as well as reviewing the most interesting specialist American releases.

This month’s cover artist is Raphaël Pichon, who with his ensemble Pygmalion won a Gramophone Award last year for their glorious recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and who talks to us about his new recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers. Elsewhere in the issue, conductor John Andrews tells about recording Ethel Smyth’s opera Der Wald, which was first performed at the New York Met in 1903, and remained the only opera by a woman to be performed there for more than a century. We also drop in on vocal ensemble I Fagiolini as they record their latest ambitious project of Masses by Benevoli. Two other major features this month include our annual Season Preview, which highlights concerts and events awaiting audiences from this autumn onwards, and with just one issue to go before the Gramophone Awards we unveil the shortlist for this year’s accolades. Korean violinist Kyung-Wha Chung is our Icon, and the Collection is a special longer-length edition looking at the recorded history of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Plus, reviews of the latest classical releases by our world-leading experts, and much more!