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.

Gramophone’s March issue features the French composer Maurice Ravel on the cover. Mark Pullinger explores the output of this fastidious composer, drawing together recurrent themes in a compact and perceptive overview of his music. James Jolly talks to Sir Stephen Hough about the pianist-composer’s new Piano Concerto, released on Hyperion this month; and Hattie Butterworth discusses The Sixteen’s annual Choral Pilgrimage, which reaches its 25th anniversary this year, with the group’s conductor Harry Christophers. In our Icons feature Michael McManus considers the career of the Northern Irish soprano Heather Harper, while in our Contemporary Composer feature Richard Whitehouse introduces the work of the British composer Charlotte Bray and suggests some essential listening. For the Musician and Score, Peter Quantrill talks to pianist Tamara Stefanovich about working with Boulez on the composer’s uncompromising Piano Sonata No 2. In addition, Richard Osborne writes a major Collection feature on Beethoven’s Symphony No 7, considering almost a century of recordings of this great work.