Violinist Joshua Bell reunites with two of his favorite collaborating artists and friends – cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Jeremy Denk – for Sony Classical’s new recording of the piano trios of Felix Mendelssohn. The new recording follows a unique all-Brahms collection For the Love of Brahms – released by Sony Classical in 2018 – that was also a collaboration of Bell, Isserlis and Denk.

When the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields began to popularize Vivaldi's music in the 1970s, it was on the cutting edge with its light, warm chamber orchestra sound, burnished to technical perfection yet sounding completely different from its symphonic cousins. Now, a recording like this one, with star violinist Joshua Bell, sounds conservative in comparison with young bucks like Fabio Biondi on the historical-performance side or even the young Dutch firebrand Janine Jansen. This big-budget (by classical standards) release is the kind of thing you don't see so often now, with a big poster showing Bell carefully decked out in a partially undone tie, as well as individual full-color cards reproducing, in Italian and English, the descriptive seasonal sonnets that provide the program for the four concertos. It could have collapsed under its own weight, but Bell pulls it off. Conducting the Academy strings himself, he forges tight, not-overly-sweet recordings of Vivaldi's four familiar concertos, with a nice contrast between orchestra and solo that showcases his easy, compelling agility and his Heifetz-like sharpness and brilliance.

Violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis are joined by two acclaimed musical forces - pianist Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of which Bell is Music Director – in a landmark joint recording, For the Love of Brahms (Sony Classical). Available September 30, 2016, the new album is a unique project that features works of Brahms and Schumann that Bell calls “music about love and friendship.” Bell, Isserlis and Denk unite here in Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 in its rarely performed original 1854 version. Isserlis also joins Bell – as violin soloist and director – and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Brahms’s last orchestral work, the celebrated Double Concerto (for Violin and Cello) in A Minor, Op. 102. Bell, Isserlis and members of the Academy also offer the first recording of an unusual coupling: the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto, in a version for string orchestra made by Benjamin Britten, who also added a short coda.

With Musical Gifts, world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell imagines friends coming to his home during the holiday and joining in on songs that celebrate the warmth, beauty and magic of the season. Following the concept of his critically acclaimed 2009 album, At Home with Friends, Bell is paired with a variety of special guests including Gloria Estefan, Alison Krauss, Kristin Chenoweth, saxophonist Chris Botti, jazz greats Chick Corea and Branford Marsalis, opera stars Plácido Domingo and Renée Fleming, Michael Feinstein and a cappella group Straight No Chaser.

Joshua Bell has returned to the mainstream repertoire from his recent successful excursions into film (The Red Violin) and bluegrass-crossover (Short Trip Home), and his playing, always brilliant, and arresting, has reached a new peak. Despite the booklet's claim to the contrary, these two concertos have nothing in common except fiendishly difficult bravura solo parts; rather, they represent a perfectly valid pairing of opposites. Bell makes the most of the contrasts, bringing out each work's idiomatic character.

In 1995, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Mark O'Connor joined forces on Appalachia Waltz, the first of a series of Sony Classical albums celebrating the varied musical textures of Americana. Over the course of six years, several albums were cut, among them Short Trip Home, Liberty!, Uncommon Ritual, and Midnight on the Water, in addition to the Grammy-winning Appalachia Waltz. Each project may have had its own specific instrumental focus, although the shared theme was clearly to obfuscate the genre lines that separate classical and traditional American music on a 200-year journey from the concert halls of Britain to the Shenandoah Valley.

One of the most popular instrumentalists in the world, trumpeter Chris Botti gets back to the jazz essence of his artistry on his Blue Note debut Vol. 1 featuring beautiful new ballad renditions of standards including “Old Folks,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Someday My Prince Will Come” & “Blue In Green” as well as a cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You” and the vocal feature “Paris” with John Splithoff. The album was produced by David Foster and also features performances by violinist Joshua Bell, pianist Taylor Eigsti, guitarist Gilad Hekselman, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and others.

Prokofiev’s chamber music is stimulating, hugely varied, and impregnated with his distinctive brand of melody. Take the two Violin Sonatas – the First intensely dramatic, by turns rhetorical and contemplative, epic in its content; the Second altogether cosier, a reworking of a slightly earlier Sonata for the flute. Bell and Mustonen are well attuned to this music, their interpretations thoughtful and persuasive.

It is not clear what took Sony Classical five years to issue these performances, recorded by violinist Joshua Bell and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in 2018. Having had it in the can, it would have made ideal pandemic-era listening. However, better is certainly late than never, and the recording is a real find. It made classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2023. Most musical fusions have one tradition or the other at the core, but in this one, the trips between Western and Chinese are so numerous that one loses track.

Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell’s forthcoming recording Butterfly Lovers features one of the most renowned works in the Chinese classical violin repertoire, the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto. Recorded with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) and conducted by Tsung Yeh, the work is a distinctive adaptation for an ensemble of traditional Chinese instruments.

It's hard to believe that it's almost 30 years since Joshua Bell recorded these concertos with Ashkenazy and the Cleveland Orchestra. They still sound very good, and I was particularly taken by the Wieniawski because I had enjoyed Heifetz's performance from the early 1950s, but the quality of the orchestral sound here made me realize what the earlier recording lacked. The Tchaikovsky is excellent too, and Ashkenazy's accompaniments are alert and well-integrated with the solo part, and the recording, thankfully, does not spotlight the violin unduly the balance seems just right to me.

I'm afraid that understates the ethereal quality of Bell's extraction of living musical notes from his Stradivarius. The spiritual oneness that happens with a virtuoso and his/her instrument is what makes the connection between the listener and the player. The instrument becomes a unique voice that communicates the essence of music, which itself, is an extension of the writer.

Joshua Bell's fresh approach to these violin warhorses makes for an unexpectedly inviting listening experience. In the Mendelssohn he marries his bright tone to forthright phrasing in a manner that communicates the music's emotion without sliding into the gooey sweetness heard in some interpretations. There's little if anything hackneyed about Bell's reading, indicating he's thought about the work anew, right through to the stylistically appropriate cadenza he composed himself (Bell cites research that suggests Mendelssohn's friend Ferdinand David may have actually composed the original cadenza).

Bassist Edgar Meyer, equally at home in Nashville or Lincoln Center, likes to invite his classical friends to mix with his country friends in performances of his hybrid brand of bluegrass chamber music. In SHORT TRIP HOME, he has assembled a team long on bow arms. Featured are guitarist Mike Marshall and mandolin player Sam Bush, both of whom double on fiddle, and star violinist Joshua Bell, the name above the title, who not only fits well into the proceedings, but soars right above them when the occasion calls for it.