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.

The June issue of Gramophone meets with mezzo Magdalena Kožená and pianist Mitsuko Uchida to discuss their new recording for Pentatone, drawing together songs by Debussy and Messiaen. Also in the issue, violinist Bojan Čičić talks to us about recording Biber’s collection of sonatas from 1681 with the Illyria Consort, and the new music director of St John’s College, Cambridge, Christopher Gray, reflects on recording music by James MacMillan and Roxana Panufnik, as well as new works by Joanna Marsh and Helena Paish. Elsewhere in the issue, this month’s Icons remembers the musicianship of the great Czech conductor Jiří Bělohlávek, while in Classics Reconsidered we consider the merits of Herbert von Karajan’s only recording of Nielsen, his 1981 DG account of Symphony No 4. Collection explores the available recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Pushkin-inspired opera The Queen of Spades, in Contemporary Composers we celebrate British composer Gabriel Jackson, while in Musician & the Score, Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili talks about Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. Finally, in My Music, author William Boyd tells Gramophone about his musical journey which led to working on an opera with composer Colin Matthews. Plus, as always, we review the latest classical albums, with the very best named Editor’s Choices.