This week's Gramophone Podcast features the countertenor Reginald Mobley, who joins us to talk about his new album 'Because', a programme of Spirituals performed with jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon, and available on the Alpha label. He tells Editor Martin Cullingford about recording these beautiful, and moving, works, what they mean to him and what he hopes they will mean to audiences.

The Gramophone Award-winning pianist Kirill Gerstein has recorded Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko: it forms part of a twinned release, 'Rachmaninoff 150', from Platoon. James Jolly met up with Gerstein a couple of months ago in London to talk about playing the music of a composer who left us two recordings of the concerto as well as being one of the greatest pianists ever to have lived. The second part of the programme includes solo works, with the Corelli Variations forming the centrepiece.

Chandos was named Gramophone's Label of the Year at the 2022 Gramophone Classical Music Awards in October – a perfect excuse for a series of podcasts focusing on some of the label's key artists and the people who steer and shape the label.

This month, James Jolly talks to the conductor Edward Gardner, Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic and Chief Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic; in August 2024 he will assume the Music Directorship of the Norwegian Opera and Ballet. His recorded catalogue for Chandos is extensive and is crowned by the 2020 release of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, recorded in Bergen, which was voted Gramophone's Opera Award winner but also our Recording of the Year.

On this week's Gramophone Podcast we talk to tenor Karim Sulayman and guitarist Sean Shibe about their album 'Broken Branches', released today on the Pentatone label. Featuring music by composers including Dowland, Britten, and Takemitsu, as well traditional songs from the Middle East, it's a fascinating and highly personal project for them both. A podcast produced in association with Wigmore Hall.

James Newby's new album, 'Fallen to Dust', for BIS explores English song, and particularly English on the theme of death. Joined by the pianist Joseph Middleton, he offers cycles by Sir Arthur Somerville and Gerald Finzi, as well as songs spanning a century, including contemporary settings by Jonathan Dove and Errollyn Wallen. A former BBC New Generation Artist, a recipient of a 2022 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, a Rising Star for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and an ECHO Rising Star, Newby's career has taken off impressively. James Jolly met up with him earlier this week to talk about the new album.

Gramophone Podcasts are given in association with Wigmore Hall.

Countertenor Alexander Chance – last year's winner of the International Handel Singing Competition – joins Gramophone Editor Martin Cullingford to talk about his debut album of English lute songs, 'Drop not, mine Eyes', recorded with lutenist Tony Carr and available from Linn.

Carlo Rizzi, Opera Rara's Artistic Director, has recorded Mercadante's Il Proscritto for Opera Rara, another rarity to add to the label's growing catalogue. A well-chosen line-up of singers, including Ramón Vargas, Iván Ayón-Rivas, Irene Roberts, Elizabeth DeShong, Sally Matthews, Goderdzi Janelidze and Susana Gaspa, are joined by the Britten Sinfonia and Opera Rara Chorus. James Jolly catches up with the conductor.

The French pianist Cédric Tiberghien has just released a new album, Variation[s], on Harmonia Mundi. It takes Beethoven's many sets of themes and variations for solo piano as its starting point, and weaves in major sets by others composers, in Vol 1 by Mozart, Schumann and Webern.

James Jolly caught up with the pianist in New York, by Zoom, to talk about the project and find out his thinking on the programme of this first volume.

Gramophone Podcasts are given in association with Wigmore Hall

Guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre talks to Gramophone Editor Martin Cullingford about his debut album for Deutsche Grammophon, Visages Baroque, which weaves a programme of arrangements of music by French Baroque composers around two major pieces by Bach. This Gramophone Podcast is produced in association with Wigmore Hall.

Tom Poster is pianist and co-artistic director of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, and in the latest in our series celebrating our Label of the Year Chandos Records, Editor Martin Cullingford talks to him about what defines the group and its aims, and about their three albums so far.