This week’s new release schedule for classical repertoire available in spatial audio is a little quieter than last week’s big haul. But there’s still plenty to look forward to on Friday, September 4.
Let’s start with the third album release by the up-and-coming Esmé Quartet, all on the Alpha Classics label. This string quartet was formed in Cologne in 2016 by four Korean friends, and they burst into the limelight two years later when they won First Prize and four (!) special prizes at the 2018 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition. For this latest recording, Esmé Quartet has returned to music associated with their Wigmore Hall history: Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No.6, Op.80. Titled “Nui” (meaning family), is themed around Mendelssohn family associations (including works by both Felix and Fanny). This particular work was a cornerstone of a pair of concerts they gave over a weekend at Wigmore Hall in 2023:
Another much anticipated release this week is Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini‘s complete recording of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. The strange thing about this release is the round-about way I Fagiolini has approached it. By my count, they have actually recorded seven Monteverdi-related audio albums across 36 years, beginning with their debut CD “The Art of Monteverdi” in 1990. They even did two previous “vespers”-adjacent programs for Decca: “1612 Italian Vespers” in 2012, which offered a hypothetical Feast of the Holy Rosary service fashioned from music by Monteverdi and contemporaries like the Gabrieli’s and Viadana; and “The Other Vespers” in 2017, which took inspiration from an ecstatic contemporary account of Monteverdi directing a vespers service in 1620, relying mostly on selections from his Selva morale e spirituale collection of 1640. Here’s their studio performance of Laudate pueri from the latter set:
We’re headed back to Wigmore Hall for the next video on today’s playlist. We have two major debut albums by young pianists arriving in spatial audio streaming this week. First consider Antonina Suhanova, who makes a daring debut with an all-Prokofiev programme: the three “War” sonatas nos. 6, 7 & 8. She has a lot of history with Prokofiev. She made her Barbican debut in 2016 as a Guildhall Gold Medal finalist, performing the formidable Piano Concerto No. 2. I recall that she appeared a couple of years ago in my home town, at The Banff Centre, performing Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6. And as you can see below, she brought Sonata No. 8 to Wigmore Hall for her debut there, in June 2021. Evidently she has been committed to Prokofiev’s most challenging mature piano music for quite some time.
As I noted in Atmos This Week (Aug. 31, 2026), South Korean pianist Saehyun Kim is just 19 years old, still a student at New England Conservatory, and yet he is making his recording debut on Warner Classics tomorrow. This comes on the back of sweeping the top prizes at the 2025 Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris. As an entertaining teaser of what we can expect of his debut album, titled “Chopin & Fauré“, and themed loosely around music connected with Paris, here is his pop-tinged appearance at the Champs de Mars / Eiffel Tower venue last summer in Paris: he plays Liszt Liebestraum No. 3, Faure Impromptu No. 2, and then he finishes with “En avril à Paris” arranged by Alexis Weissenberg – which is also the closer on Chopin & Fauré:
check back later for more…
