- Reginald Mobley, Baptiste Trotignon: “Because” (Alpha)
- Yulianna Avdeeva: “Resilience” (Pentatone)
- Rachel Redmond, Marianne Beate Kielland, Mingjie Lei, Manuel Walser, Le Concert Des Nations, Jordi Savall: Mozart: “Requiem” (Alia Vox)
- Dresdner Philharmonie, Marek Janowski: “Schubert Symphonies: Unfinished & Great” (Pentatone)
The late (do I even have to say “great”?) Tina Turner’s first songwriting credit remains an anomaly in her canon: a riff on “City Called Heaven,” with some of the original text interspersed with Turner’s own lyrics. It’s a delicate arrangement, just Turner’s voice in its fathomless low range and Ike Turner’s slightly hollow-sounding blues guitar. The closing couplet shows her work side by side with the spiritual’s original text, and the new meaning that comes from this pairing: “My mother and father don’t own me, I’ll try to make heaven my home.” Her title for the song plays on yet another famous spiritual: “I Am a Motherless Child.”