Atmos This Week August 31 2026

These are the releases in Dolby Atmos spatial audio you can look out for this week, sorted by release day. Links will take you directly to Apple Music, log in there for a seamless listening experience. Friday is the usual release day on streaming services, so set aside some listening time on September 4!

September 4

Carlo Vistoli (countertenor), Giulia Semenzato (sop.), Le Concert d'Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm (cond.) — Handel's Italians: Italian Castrati in the London Oratorios (harmonia mundi, 2026). Building a program around the roles of celebrated castrati in the 18th century is not a novel idea: Emmanuelle Haïm and her Concert d’Astrée ensemble have gone there before: their 2007 collaboration with the celebrated Philippe Jaroussky, “Carestini: A Castrato’s Story” is part of their origin story. Nearly twenty years later, their leading man is Carlo Vistoli, and the story line is devoted entirely to Handel, and three singers he relied on to popularize his oratorios in London: Senesino in Esther and Deborah, Carestini in the revised Athalia, and Guadagni in the later oratorios.

Signum Quartett — the earth trembled (Pentatone, 2026). The pairing of Janacek’s two string quartets is familiar to chamber music enthusiasts, but the Signum Quartett have come up with an intriguing way to provide a fresh take: they set these two intensely personal late masterpieces beside Vitezslava Kapralova’s remarkably assured youthful Quartet, Op. 8. This extends the programme into a younger generation of Czech modernism. They also weave in a number of string-quartet arrangements of Janacek’s Moravian folk tunes and miniature musical inscriptions… all of which turns the album into an extended narrative of desire, violence, memory and folk traditions.

Saehyun Kim (piano) — Chopin & Fauré (Warner Classics, 2026). South Korean pianist Saehyun Kim is 19 years old, still a student at New England Conservatory, and he is making his recording debut on Warner Classics on the strength of sweeping the top prizes at the 2025 Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris (First Grand Prize as well as the audience and press prizes). And Paris is the focal point of the album, including Chopin’s Op. 25 Etudes, a set of early Fauré pieces (including his own arrangement of “Après un rêve”), and ending with “En Avril à Paris” in an arrangement by Alexis Weissenberg.

Esmé Quartet — Nui (Alpha Classics, 2026). Nui is the Korean word for “sister,” and San Francisco based Esmé Quartet explores “siblinghood” on their third album, featuring string quartets by Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny, plus Korean American composer Juri Seo‘s new “river at the end of the mind,” inspired by the Korean song Eommaya nunaya (“Mother, Sister”). This suggests a thoughtful journey from Fanny’s independent voice, through her brother’s grief, towards consolation.