La sélection Gramophone du mois (may 2018)

This month, Brahms guides our recommendations. From the Verbier Festival, Anne Sofie von Otter and friends give us the Liebeslieder-Walzer, Rudolf Kempe conducts the Second Symphony with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in 1973 while Sir Simon Rattle and his Berlin Philharmonic perform the First Piano Concerto (with Daniel Barenboim) alongside Schoenberg’s orchestration of the first Piano Quartet, a 2004 concert recorded in the striking setting of Athens’s Herod Atticus Odeon. Yuja Wang and Leonidas Kavakos perform the violin sonatas and Claudio Abbado conducts A German Requiem. Barenboim re-appears to dispense his wisdom as conductor in a masterclass with the young Robin Ticciati (who adorned last month’s front cover). Our Young Artist focus finds the cellist Edgar Moreau playing Shostakovich and, in the documentary slot, Nicolai Gedda, the great Swedish tenor, takes the limelight. And if you want to compare two major conductors in the same work, how about watching Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.