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.

In this month’s cover feature we explore what recording means to a generation of Young Artists who have embraced the medium, creating albums whose variety, musical richness and technical excellence suggest that we are living through a new golden age of recording. We also meet the young Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, who first came to widespread attention at the age of 20 when he won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2009 – an amazing achievement for a pianist who was blind from birth – as he release his new album on Deutsche Grammophon. Meanwhile, our annual Competition Guide presents the best competitions of 2026 to look forward to across the UK, Europe, the US and beyond. Elsewhere in the issue, in Icons we celebrate the career of the great Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff, one of the most famous Boris Godunovs of the recording era; in Classics Reconsidered, we look back at Krystian Zimerman’s recording of Ravel’s piano concertos with Pierre Boulez, an intriguing partnership that won a Gramophone Award in 1999; and in Collection, JS Bach’s early sacred cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV106, generally known as ‘Actus tragicus’, is the focus. Our Contemporary Composers feature this month introduces the work of the Finnish composer Seppo Pohjola, while Musician & the Score finds the young Georgian pianist Georgi Gigashvili taking us through Prokofiev’s ever-popular Piano Sonata No 7. Plus, as always, we our expert critics review the latest classical releases, with the finest being named Editor’s Choices.