Critics Choice 2025

As another year of preparing and publishing many hundreds of reviews draws to a close, the three team members most involved - Reviews Editor Gavin Dixon, Deputy Editor Tim Parry, and Editor and Publisher Martin Cullingford - take time out to discuss what lies behind the process, and how we decide which albums are named Gramophone Editor's Choices. And, after that, they celebrate their own personal pick of the year, explaining which recording they chose for our annual Critics' Choice feature, and why it so impressed and inspired them.

In this week's Gramophone Podcast we remember Alfred Brendel, one of the most significant and much-loved musical figures of age, in the company of his son, the cellist Adrian Brendel, who takes Editor Martin Cullingford around the pianist's library and studio and reflects on what his books, art and belongings tell us about him. He also talks about a very special event on January 5, at the Barbican in London, at which fellow artists and friends of Alfred Brendel will gather for a remarkable evening of music, to celebrate his life and also raise money for a cause very close to his heart.

In this week's edition of of the Gramophone Podcast, Editor Martin Cullingford is joined by the conductor and harpsichordist Christophe Rousset to talk about his new album of Christmas music by the 17th century composer Charpentier - called a Baroque Christmas - recorded with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, and released on the ensemble's own label, Soli Deo Gloria.

We're joined for this week's Gramophone Podcast by composer Thomas Adès and two members of the Ruisi Quartet, violinist Alessandro Ruisi and viola player Luba Tunnicliffe, to talk about their recording of Növények, Adès's setting of seven Hungarian poems for mezzo-soprano and piano sextet. They explore this fascinating work with Gramophone Editor Martin Cullingford, which is newly released on the Platoon label along with Haydn's String Quartet in G Minor Op 20, No 3, and an arrangement of A legszebb Virág by Ligeti. 

Hattie Butterworth is joined by pianist and historian Samantha Ege and author Leah Broad to discuss the life and music of composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor as the first recording of her orchestral music and piano concerto is released on Resonus

In May this year, the Concertgebouw – Amsterdam's legendary concert hall – played host to the 2025 Mahler Festival. Originally scheduled for 2000, the centenary of the first such event, but moved back by five years due to the pandemic, the Mahler Festival saw all of Mahler's symphonies performed chronologically over two weeks, and performed by a handful of the world's great orchestras. The Eighth Symphony fell to the local band, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and their Chief Conductor Designate, Klaus Mäkelä, who gave two performances, both of which were recorded. And that recording has just been released by Decca – digitally worldwide, with a CD version available in Japan and Korea to coincide with the orchestra's first tour of Asia with Mäkelä before Christmas. James Jolly caught up with Klaus Mäkelä to talk about the conductor's continuing fascination with Mahler's music, and particularly with the Eighth Symphony, the performances of which were clearly a highpoint in the conductor's career so far.

Mao Fujita, who took second prize in the Piano category at the 2019 Tchaikovsky Competition, released an album on Sony Classical of 72 preludes back in the autumn of 2024 – the three sets of 24 by Chopin, Scriabin and Akio Yashiro. Now as a pendant to that project he has recorded another six, by Ravel, Rachmaninov, Mompou, Franck, Busoni and Alkan. These have been issued individually over the past couple of months, and on November 28 they are all gathered together as an EP. James Jolly caught up with Mao Fujita in the summer at the Verbier Festival and spoke to him about the 72 preludes album, the new six preludes, and his plans for the future.

The composer, academic and writer Robin Holloway has just published a new book, Music's Odyssey, An Invitation to Western Classical Music (Allen Lane). He's Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where James Jolly went to visit him a couple of weeks ago to talk about the book's genesis and aims. The podcast features an excerpt from Holloway's Second Concerto for Orchestra played by the BBC SO conducted by Oliver Knussen on NMC which won Gramophone's Contemporary Music Award in 1994, and also one from Hans Werner Henze's Undine, played by the London Sinfonietta, also conducted by Oliver Knussen on DG.

The French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky has just released a new Erato album of cantatas da camera by Alessandro Scarlatti, Porpora, Galuppi, Handel and Vivaldi, 'Gelosia!'. On it he also conducts his ensemble Artaserse, which he founded in 2002, and with which he increasingly appears solely as conductor rather than as singer. Gramophone's James Jolly went to talk to him in Paris about the new album, but also about a major milestone in his musical career, 25 years of making recordings for Erato.

The Hermes Experiment - an ever-innovative, exploratory and imaginative ensemble - have released their new album, Tree, a meditation on nature, memory and change embracing contemporary composers and reimagined music from the past. Two members of the group, soprano Héloïse Werner and clarinetist Oliver Pashley - who also both have compositions on the album - joined Editor Martin Cullingford in the Gramophone Podcast studio to discuss this beautiful release.