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Recorded using part of Alexi Kenney’s BBT Award 2020 and including two BBT commissions, Shifting Ground – released on Bright Shiny Things on 7 June 2024 – is Alexi’s love letter to Bach, with solo Bach works cheek-by-jowl with modern works and new commissions.  This is the opening track, Bach’s Violin Sonata No 1 in G minor BWV 1001, the first movement, Adagio. The album ends full circle in the epic Chaconne that ends Bach’s Second Partita in D minor BWV 1004, in between encompassing 20th and  21st-century works including two BBT commissions, by Angélica Negrón and Salina Fisher, as seen at BBT’s 20th birthday anniversary celebrations at London’s Wigmore Hall in June 2023.

After Beethoven comes Brahms: that’s the trajectory followed by enterprising Trio Sōra in turning to Brahms’ Complete Piano Trios – released on La Dolce Volta on 26 April – after its acclaimed Beethoven cycle. As cellist Angèle Legasa says: “We started at the beginning: who was Brahms? How did he grow up musically? He began his musical career with a Gypsy violinist; he’s the spiritual son of Beethoven… that’s how we worked with Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure [from Quatuor Ébène], who helped us to delve into all the harmonic colours of Brahms’ music, to surpass ourselves and express deep emotions, with a warmth of sound so typical of Brahms”. Here the trio plays Brahms’ song Wiegenlied arranged by former member of the Ébènes, Mathieu Herzog.

The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam gives the world premiere of Bushra El-Turk’s Three Tributes at the String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam on 3 February 2024, at the Muziekgebouw. A co-commission between Borletti-Buitoni Trust, West Cork Chamber Music Festival and String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam, Three Tributes offers musical portraits of three Levantine female singers who lived during the Nahda period, a cultural renaissance in the Arabic-speaking world that took place between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. In preparation, this film records Bushra El-Turk’s meeting with the Dukok Quartet to work on her quartet’s sound world.

Trio Isimsiz commissioned, with BrittenPears Arts and Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical Madrid, Francisco Coll’s Piano Trio. Delayed by a year, the world premiere was given in Madrid in January 2022 and the UK premiere was given at the Britten Studio in Aldeburgh in June 2022. In August 2022 the Trio took it into the recording studio for Rubicon Classics, where its musical bedfellows were Brahms’ C major Trio Op 87 and Korngold’s Piano Trio – his Op 1. We were there to film the rehearsals and first day of the recording at The Menuhin Hall, interviewing all three members of the Trio and composer Francisco Coll. The CD – completing Trio Isimsiz’s Brahms cycle – is released on 8 December 2023.