- Chineke! Orchestra, Elena Urioste, Kevin John Edusei: “Coleridge-Taylor” (Decca)
- Collegium 1704, Václav Luks: Smetana “Má vlast” (Accent)
- Parisa Sabet: “A Cup of Sins” (Redshift Music)
Among the cameos in Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, Kira Thurman’s jam-packed history of Black performers in German-speaking Europe, is Claudio Brindis de Salas Garrido. Thurman describes the virtuoso violinist as “a mirror reflecting German conversations about Black masculine musicality in the Kaiserreich,” or the German Empire. Brindis de Salas’s signature recital-closer was Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s Rossini-based “Othello Fantasy.” On the one hand, the selection isn’t out of the ordinary: Like many finales, it’s a showcase of virtuosic feats that ends the evening with a dazzling, victorious flourish. But, as Thurman points out, Brindis de Salas “picking a work on the theme of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ might also suggest an awareness of his own Black masculinity. He might have chosen it to capitalize on how audiences perceived him. Or it might have been a defiant gesture, a wink, or a nod.” Either way, the choice doesn’t seem incidental or haphazard: In Brindis de Salas’s time, the figure of Othello was “one of the most recognizable and potentially uplifting symbols of Black masculinity.”