If you aren’t Canadian – maybe even if you are – you might not be familiar with Montreal’s Analekta label. Since the late 1980s, Analekta has been building one of the most distinctive catalogues in the business by betting on Canadian artists, Canadian repertoire and Canadian venues. They only release a handful of recordings each year, but their well-judged approach to artists and repertoire makes an outsized impact – and not just in Canada.
For today’s playlist I’ll focus on orchestral recordings, but I should mention that Analekta covers the full gamut of genres and forms in their offerings. For example, in my my featured playlist for Canada Day, I included their album of Brahms Violin Sonatas, with the violin-piano duo of Andrew Wan and Charles Richard-Hamelin.
We begin here with a movement from Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, BWV 1043.
That’s a track from Analekta’s April 2025 release J. S. Bach: The Complete Violin Concertos, with the superb Canadian violinist James Ehnes leading the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada from the violin. It’s quite a deluxe two-disc album that includes everything Bach wrote for solo violin and orchestra, not just the canonic violin concerto orginals, but all of reworkings and violin restorations of works that survive only as harpsichord concertos.
Ehnes is something of a cult hero in the violin world these days, a “violinist’s violin player.” And he tells us in the liner notes that it has been his dream for many years to record these works in their entirety; and in particular to record them with the NAC Orchestra, where he has been Artist-in-Residence for the past three seasons. It turns out to be a very fine collaboration, and he brings his unique blend of precision and warmth to the proceedings. Highly recommended!
More recently, towards the end of 2025, Analekta released another NAC Orchestra album, and it could hardly be more different.
That’s the National Arts Centre Orchestra, led by their Music Director (since 2015) Alexander Shelley. The album is titled Poema 2 – Terra Nova, and it encapsulates the Analekta mission in a single programme, juxtaposing new Canadian music and familiar standard repertoire with conceptual flair.
Poema 2 is the second in a continuing series that pairs Richard Strauss tone poems with newly-commissioned Canadian works that respond to them. The composers are free to embrace, critique or deconstruct the Strauss model as they see fit. Here the marker is Also sprach Zarathustra, and the response comes from Ian Cusson, a Métis and French-Canadian composer who was the NAC Orchestra’s inaugural “Carrefour” composer-in-residence. Where Strauss answers Nietzsche by reaching for cosmic certainties, Cusson gives us shifting textures, haunted lyricism and an undertow of unease.
The NAC Orchestra is a compact Classical-era ensemble, but the Strauss requires a full-size Romantic orchestra, so there are many extra players on the call for this performance. You would be hard-pressed to notice any rough edges though, as the expanded orchestra plays with cohesion and refinement. Shelley’s Zarathustra has muscle and sweep, and Analekta’s engineering in the National Arts Centre’s Southam Hall lets the organ and low brass register their sonic weight without fighting for space.
Further Listening
NAC Orchestra / Alexander Shelley, Poema 1. Ad Astra (Analekta, 2025). If the series concept appeals to you, be sure to check out the first volume too. Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration are paired with responses by Kelly-Marie Murphy and Kevin Lau.
Isabelle Faust / Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Bach Violin Concertos (Harmonia Mundi, 2019). A period-instrument counterweight to Ehnes and the NAC. Leaner, spikier, dance-driven Bach, with a completely different energy.
More From Analekta
Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà, Elle (Analekta, 2021): Dubeau’s all-women string ensemble marks its 25th anniversary with a program written entirely by living women composers, plus a nod to Hildegard von Bingen, much of it arranged by Dubeau herself. Won the Félix Album of the Year (Classical).
Charles Richard-Hamelin, ÉCHOS: Chopin, Granados, Albéniz (Analekta, 2025): Richard-Hamelin is the mainstay of Analekta’s impressive roster of pianists, silver medalist at the 2015 Chopin Competition, and the label has built a substantial Chopin discography around him. Here he steps sideways into Spanish repertoire, framing the Chopin against Granados and Albéniz. The international press has been warm.
Gryphon Trio, Tango Nuevo (Analekta, 2008): The label’s Canadian-artist mandate reaches well beyond the attention-getting orchestras and soloists into the quieter, deeper end of the catalogue. This Toronto piano trio was prominent among Analekta’s chamber music ensembles for years. Their releases range from the standard trio literature to commissioned Canadian works.
Karina Gauvin, Jeanne Lamon, Tafelmusik: Handel Arias and Dances (Analekta, 1999): A back-catalog selection for the vocal and early-music crowds. Gauvin is a Canadian soprano with an international Baroque-specialist career, and her disc of Handel with Toronto’s Tafelmusik is exactly the kind of home-grown-artist meets core-repertoire pairing that characterizes Analekta’s A&R instinct.
