Welcome to our annual roundup of classical highlights for 2025! It’s been yet another vintage year for recordings, as showcased by the contents of this month’s bumper playlist. I’ve selected some of the year’s most notable releases and events, some of them featured in previous dCS playlists, some not. 

Kicking things off is a 2025 reissue: a vibrantly captured 1940 recording, newly remastered from 78 rpm discs for Albion Records, of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending with Frederick Grinke (1911-1987) as soloist. Grinke was concertmaster with the orchestra you hear supporting him, the Boyd Neel Orchestra under Louis Boyd Neel. Vaughan Williams was so impressed with this recording that he went on to tailor and dedicate his 1954 Violin Sonata in A minor to Grinke. It’s a beautifully clean, unfussy and non-sentimental reading (think strength and nobility). 

Turning next to composer birthdays and anniversaries, Maurice Ravel’s (1875-1937) 150th birthday was well marked with ‘Paris 2025’, a box set of orchestral works for Naïve Records from Cristian Măcelaru and the Orchestre National de France, recorded over three concerts at the Maison de la Radio and the Philharmonie de Paris. Anothe standout tribute came from Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who released the complete Ravel solo piano works on Chandos.

The 20th century French anniversaries continued with the death centenary of Erik Satie (1866-1925) and the birth centenary of Pierre Boulez (1925-2016). Away from France, the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death was commemorated with several projects, including the conclusion of Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s ten-year Shostakovich cycle. There was also the 125th birthday of Aaron Copland and the 300th anniversary of Alessandro Scarlatti’s death in 1725. The latter was notably marked by Jae-Yeon Won, whose debut with Onyx included the first modern-piano recordings of Scarlatti’s keyboard works, alongside works from the composer’s son, Domenico.

There were major milestone birthdays for major figures still with us, too: Arvo Pärt celebrated his 90th birthday (an event that was lovingly celebrated in Pärt’s native Estonia under the baton of his friend Paavo Järvi). Itzhak Perlman turned 80. Sir Simon Rattle reached 70.

Other artists with things to celebrate this year included Víkingur Ólafsson, 2025 recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal – presented to him onstage in September at London’s Festival Hall, just after performing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concert with Santtu-Matias Rouvali and the Philharmonia Orchestra. In May, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla punched through one of classical music’s remaining glass ceilings to become the first woman to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the 165 years of its subscription series, at the Vienna Konzerthaus. 

Among the usual smattering of major conductor appointments, Esa-Pekka Salonen announced major new roles in both Paris and Los Angeles: principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris, and creativity and innovation chair of the Philharmonie de Paris (a newly created post), both from the 2027/28 season; and creative director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic effective from the start of the 2026/27. Los Angeles Opera, meanwhile, announced Domingo Hindoyan as its music director, also from the 2026/27 season. Hindoyan has, incidentally, had another magnificent year on UK stages, not least at the BBC Proms as Chief Conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

As ever though, it wasn’t all celebration in 2025. We sadly lost two wonderful conductors – historical performance luminary Roger Norrington (1934-2025) and acclaimed Berlioz interpreter John Nelson (1941-2025) – as well as revered pianist and pedagogue Alfred Brendel (1931-2025) and composer Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-2025).

Moving from events on to recordings, and this year saw rising and emerging talent once again producing an abundance of gold. Timothy Ridout’s superb first solo viola album, covered here in February, went on to be shortlisted for a Gramophone Award. Violinist Maria Dueñas meanwhile was named Gramophone’s 2025 Young Artist of the Year. She also received Gramophone’s Instrumental Award for her fabulously creative Paganini double album, which gave us the solo caprices, plus a multifaceted exploration of Paganini’s subsequent impact on composers and violin technique.

Turning to keyboardists, and it was a delight to see Yunchan Lim’s already-legendary 2022 Van Cliburn Competition-winning performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 3 with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop released on Decca, after racking up millions of views on YouTube. Harpischordist Jean Rondeau, meanwhile, brought us one of the most striking releases of 2025, in the first instalment of his Complete Works of Louis Couperi. The project will comprise ten volumes in total, plus a DVD. The first is riveting stuff, which will surely scoop up multiple awards.

As for truly new names, debut albums I particularly fell for this year included a sparkling recital album from French violinist and cellist brothers Luka and Léo Ispir, recording on Warner/Erato as laureates of the Fondation Gautier Capuçon; pianist Julia Hamos’s ‘Ellis Island’ for Naïve, covered here in June; violinist Clémence de Forceville’s pairing of the Ravel and Mel Bonis violin sonatas, accompanied by pianist Ismaël Margain; and the Bellot Ensemble’s Cupid’s Ground Bass, covered here last month.

In other (cherry—picked) recording news, Alice Sara Ott’s John Field album for Deutsche Grammophon, covered here in March, has just been announced as Apple Classical’s most streamed album of 2025. My personal favourite piece of recordings news, though, was Decca’s November announcement of a brand new limited-edition classic vinyl series, Decca Pure Analogue, for which it will be selecting classic recordings from the Decca and Philips catalogues to be newly mastered, cut using 100 per cent pure analogue techniques, then pressed in Germany on 180g virgin vinyl.

Other 2025 releases worthy of your Christmas holiday time? Gramophone’s 2025 Recording of the Year went to a stunningly newly-minted-sounding Bach Mass in B minor from Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion. Stephen Hough premiered his nostalgic new Piano Concerto The World of Yesterday this year, and made a beautifully captured recording of it with Hyperion. More piano gold that’s only just out now on Hyperion is Marc-André Hamelin’s intensely personal and engrossing ‘Found Objects/Sound Objects’, a glittering collage of modernist miniatures on which Frank Zappa rubs shoulders with John Cage. 

Mahler symphony fans have been well served this year, Paavo Järvi releasing a vibrant Symphony No. 1 with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and Sir Simon Rattle putting all his years as a Mahler authority into a powerful live recording of Symphony No. 7 with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Italian opera lovers should head to Daniel Harding’s studio recording of Puccini’s Tosca with the Choir and Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and a top-drawer cast led by Eleonora Buratto as Tosca, Jonathan Teteman as Cavaradossi and Ludovic Tézier as Scarpia. For a particularly luminously captured, superbly performed baroque strings album, you could do no better than Bojan Čičić and The Illyria Consort’s ‘Biber: Complete Violin Sonatas – 1681’.

From there, our final playlist of 2025 concludes with swing and a smile, courtesy of the classily swaggering performance of ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ which concludes yet another top debut album this year, the Viano Quartet’s ‘Voyager’. 

To all those celebrating, we wish you a very happy new year, and we’ll be back with more classical highlights in 2026!