Daniil Trifonov
Daniil Trifonov. Photo © Dario Acosta/DG

What's New on Disc

What to spend your Christmas money on? Try some Trifonov, or take a punt and discover Thalberg, Eccles or Paul Ben-Haim

With a flurry of new releases before year’s end, what might you spend that Christmas money on? I’ll start by contradicting my own statement from last month that there’s a lack of imaginative recordings of standard repertoire. The London Symphony Orchestra’s LSO Live label often suffers from the parched acoustic of their home at London’s Barbican, and that caveat does apply to this new release under conductor François-Xavier Roth of Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole and Debussy’s La Mer (LSO0821). The pluses definitely outweigh the minuses with Warwick Arnold...