The best classical music recordings of 2024: Ken Walton picks his top five

Scottish Chamber Orchestra Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev | Christopher Bowen

Schubert: Symphonies Nos 5 & 8​ (Linn) Schubert’s Fifth Symphony shoots off the starting block like a medal-hungry Olympic sprinter ​in this performance from Maxim Emelyanychev and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The playing is exquisite, a masterful interaction of the symphony’s intertwining textures, ​with silken poetry from the strings​ and a sound world calibrated perfectly to scale. Emelyanychev’s grasp of the textural perspective​s is sheer magic. The chamber influence is especially powerful in the third movement trio, a moment of subliminal intimacy. How much more powerful, then, the ensuing mystery of the “Unfinished” Symphony, its contrasting thoughtfulness amplified by a haunting stillness of the vibrato-less strings and gorgeously nurtured wind phrasing.

​Máire Carroll​: Philip Glass: Complete piano etudes​ (Delphian​) Irish pianist Máire Carroll​'​s new recording of the complete piano etudes embraces and articulates all the key Glass components – energy, beauty and imagination. Glass wrote these 20 minimalist studies both as a means of improving his own piano technique and of channelling his more private thoughts on an intimate scale. That’s not to say they eschew the impatient, power-driven obsessiveness that defines so much of his music. Carroll’s performances have all of that when asked for, vitalised by electrifying fingerwork. She also enhances those trademark low-set timbres and subterranean gloom with a sublime radiance, and captures an endearing reflectiveness through her personable, eloquent lyricism.

Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective​: Brahms & Contemporaries Vol 1 ​(Chandos​) The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, ever on the track of unjustly forgotten composers, unearth another neglected treasure in the first of a new three-recording series sold successively on the back of Brahms’ Piano Quartets. Partnering the lengthy, more introspective Second Quartet in Vol 1 is the radiant F minor Piano Quartet by one Luise Adolpha Le Beau. Seventeen years Brahms​' junior, like most other aspiring female artists of her time​ she battled professional suppression resulting merely from her gender. Yet here, in music as robust, exhilarating, profound and characterful as any of her male peers, there is little to place her under the shadow of Brahms. This is a pairing of piercing intellects and supreme creativity.

The Sixteen​ and Harry Christophers: Masters of Imitation​ (CORO​) This latest a cappella release by Harry Christophers and his impeccable choir The Sixteen​ celebrates the art of musical parody prevalent in Renaissance Europe, where composers borrowed fragments of existing works to model entire new pieces. The key ​figure here is Orlande de Lassus, whose own sumptuous motet Osculetur me osculo iris sui is later viewed through the magnifying lens of the Credo from his Mass of the same name, just as he transforms Josquin’s Benedicta es caelorum Regina into a dizzyingly splendid Magnificat. Music by Casulana and Châtelet explore similar grounds before Lassus himself is parodied in Bob Chilcott’s Lauda Jerusalem Dominum, a refreshingly contemporary example of this historical phenomenon.

James Ehnes​, Sir Andrew Davis​ and ​the BBC Philharmonic​: Stravinsky (Chandos) ​This exceptional disc, dedicated entirely to the ​music of Stravinsky, is utterly magical​ in its combination of precision and style. On the one hand you have conductor Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Philharmonic etching out the zestful delicacies of the two Orchestral Suites (remodelled by Stravinsky from piano duos) with crisp humour and pathos, the jazzy niceties of the Scherzo à la russe and the virtuosic restraint of his 1920s ballet Apollon musagète producing moments of ravishing warmth and affection. But the real charmer is the Violin Concerto in D, featuring ace Canadian violinist James Ehnes. ​A truly mesmerising performance.