Christina Pluhar, l’Arpeggiata
Erato · 2685430249 · 74 minutes
Christina Pluhar has always had a gift for building a world rather than just a playlist, and La Torre del Oro does exactly that — pulling you into a sun-drenched, port-city atmosphere where Baroque, folk, and improvisation blur into something genuinely alive. What Gramophone catches well is how Pluhar’s real instrument is the program itself, the way each piece feeds the next so that l’Arpeggiata’s collective energy keeps building across those 74 minutes. There’s a looseness to the playing that sounds effortless but clearly isn’t, and that tension between precision and spontaneity is exactly where this ensemble does its best work.
“Just as the torrent of joyful music-making rests on the extraordinary skills of the musicians, Pluhar herself modestly stays under the radar by design since her programming is the key to success…”
— Gramophone Magazine, June 2026
Elsa Dreisig (soprano), Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova Orchestra, Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova Choir, Massimo Zanetti
Erato · 2685409371 · 79 minutes
Elsa Dreisig has always had a voice that seems custom-built for French opera — that luminous, airy top and immaculate diction make repertoire like this feel inevitable rather than effortful. What’s striking about Invocation is how the lighter, song-like moments land just as hard as the grand gestures — her Rusalka’s Song to the Moon floats with real ease, and Desdemona’s Ave Maria carries genuine tenderness rather than just pretty sound. Zanetti and the Teatro Carlo Felice forces give her exactly the kind of attentive, unhurried support that lets a voice like hers breathe.
“Some of the lighter ‘excerptable’ numbers come off very well. Rusalka’s Song to the Moon is floated well and Desdemona’s Ave Maria is tender. French repertoire shows her voice off to best effect…Her…”
— Gramophone Magazine, July 2026
David Moreau (violin), Edgar Moreau (cello), Jérémie Moreau (piano)
Erato · 2173294026 · 1 hour 52 minutes
Schubert’s two great piano trios live in this strange emotional territory where warmth and heartbreak keep interrupting each other, and the Moreau brothers navigate that tension with an ease that feels almost uncanny. There’s a closeness to the playing here — phrases pass between violin, cello, and piano like thoughts shared mid-sentence — that you can’t manufacture by rehearsing harder, it just comes from knowing each other at a cellular level. The nearly two-hour runtime flies by because the music breathes so naturally, each movement finding its own pulse rather than being pushed into shape.
“It’s undeniable that they play almost as a single entity, the dovetailing of their voices coming over as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They are caught close- to in their island…”
— Gramophone Magazine, June 2026
Renaud Capuçon (violin), Nicholas Angelich (piano), Quatuor Ébène, Brussels Philharmonic, Stéphane Denève
Erato · 2685456552 · 61 minutes
Chausson spent his short life haunted by a kind of bittersweet longing that never quite resolves — and the Concert for Violin, Piano and String Quartet captures that feeling better than almost anything else in French Romantic music. Renaud Capuçon and Nicholas Angelich bring real chemistry to the piece, with Angelich in particular finding that rare balance between driving the music forward and letting it breathe. It’s the kind of performance where the emotional weight lands exactly where Chausson intended it to.
“[The Concert] really is something special…Angelich is marvellously expressive throughout, and propels the music’s narrative thrust with both authority and sensitivity.”
— Gramophone Magazine, June 2026
Jakub Józef Orliński (countertenor), Michał Biel (piano)
Erato · 2173298531 · 76 minutes
There’s something almost paradoxical about writing songs *about* music — you’re using one art form to describe another, and the results can either feel navel-gazing or genuinely transcendent. Orliński and Biel seem to lean hard into that tension, and a countertenor voice brings a particular otherworldly shimmer to that kind of introspective repertoire. At 76 minutes, this feels like a proper deep-dive rather than a sampler, which suggests real commitment to exploring wherever that “if music…” question actually leads.
David Munrow
Erato · 2685432094
Few musicians have ever made medieval and Renaissance music feel so viscerally alive — Munrow’s recordings buzz with a kind of infectious curiosity, as if he’s rediscovering these centuries-old pieces in real time. The shawms rasp, the sackbuts bloom, and the early plucked strings shimmer with a textural richness that feels genuinely physical rather than academic. Erato’s complete edition gathers everything into one place, and it’s the kind of set where you pull out one disc and suddenly three hours have disappeared.
Laurence Equilbey, Insula Orchestra
Erato · 2173280538
Few composers wrote for the screen with the structural elegance of the great mid-century film masters, and this program pulls from that rich tradition of orchestral storytelling where the concert hall and the cinema felt like genuine equals. Equilbey and the Insula Orchestra bring their signature period-informed clarity to music that often gets buried under nostalgia, letting the actual craft of the writing breathe. There’s something genuinely exciting about hearing this repertoire treated with the same rigor you’d give Haydn or Rameau.
Marie-Claire Alain (organ)
Erato · 2685496212 · 6 hours 24 minutes
Buxtehude’s organ music lives in this gloriously restless space between strict counterpoint and something that feels almost improvised — his praeludia especially have this wild, searching quality that can sound utterly modern one moment and deeply devotional the next. Marie-Claire Alain brings exactly the right combination of structural clarity and expressive freedom to navigate that tension, and across six and a half hours you get a real sense of the full emotional range Buxtehude was working with. It’s a tremendous amount of music to sit with, but it rewards the time generously.
