Gramophone Magazine
February 2026
Editor's Choice

Cappella Amsterdam, Noord Nederlands Orkest, Daniel Reuss

Stravinsky: In Memoriam Dylan Thomas
Stravinsky: Pater Noster
Stravinsky: Threni
Stravinsky: Double Canon (Raoul Dufy in memoriam)
Stravinsky: The dove descending breaks the air
Stravinsky: Elegy for John F Kennedy
Stravinsky: Epitaphium für das Grabmal des Prinzen Max Egon zu Fürstenberg
Stravinsky: Introitus: T. S. Eliot in memoriam
Stravinsky: Requiem Canticles
Stravinsky: Two Sacred Songs (Hugo Wolf)

Cappella Amsterdam, led by its renowned chief conductor Daniel Reuss, joins the Noord Nederlands Orkest to present a powerful recording of Igor Stravinsky’s late works. Tracing the composer’s evolution through his embrace of the twelve-tone technique, the ensemble brings these rigorously structured and spiritually charged masterpieces to life with clarity and devotion.

Statement from Christophe Guyard (Artistic Director of the Igor Stravinsky Foundation) & Marie Stravinsky (President of the Igor Stravinsky Foundation) – excerpted from the booklet:

“This recording finally sheds light on a still too little known aspect of Igor Stravinsky’s oeuvre: that of his late creative years, marked by a serial writing of profound inwardness. Under the inspired direction of Daniel Reuss, Cappella Amsterdam and the Noord Nederlands Orkest give voice to these mature works – In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), Threni (1958), Introitus (1965) and Requiem Canticles (1966) – which together form a spiritual cycle marking the composer’s final period.

One often speaks of Stravinsky’s rupture with the neoclassical era, yet we perceive rather an inner metamorphosis during the last years of his life. Stravinsky’s adoption of the twelve-tone language, much commented upon at the time, was not an aesthetic conversion but a quest for order and clarity, in keeping with the beauty of the gesture which can be traced across his manuscripts.

For Stravinsky, serial rules were a discipline comparable to the ancient canons – a means of giving form to asceticism. He liked to say that, “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free” (Poetics of Music), and that “Improvisation is the expression of indiscipline.” (Memories and Commentaries). His writing, of uncompromising graphic precision, thus bears witness to a will toward perfection, almost calligraphic in its purity.

Through this demanding and lucid interpretation, PENTATONE, Daniel Reuss and his musicians offer a rare testimony: that of a creator who, to the very end of his life, sought in music not rupture, but reconciliation with himself.”

"The best of today's specialist vocal ensembles, whether active in period practice or devoted to the new, can more or less guarantee delivery of the required pitches though vibrato-lite accuracy may come at the cost of a certain expressive immediacy." - Gramophone Magazine, February 2026