Yesterday marked the release of The Juilliard Sessions, a partnership between EMI Classics and The Juilliard School that aims to present to the world some of classical music’s most promising young stars in a series of digital EP albums.

The three inaugural recordings are by recent Juilliard alumni Paul Appleby (tenor) and Sean Lee (violin), as well as pianist Conrad Tao (a Pre-College alumnus currently at Columbia University studying in the combined bachelor-master degree program with Juilliard).

They were released by EMI Classics, available now exclusively on iTunes (www.itunes.com).

This unprecedented joint initiative offers a way to help these students gain exposure and experience in the fast-moving digital world of today’s classical music, teaching them the process of recording and releasing an album online.

Each student was selected by a panel of judges first at Juilliard, then at EMI Classics, and was given the opportunity to record an EP-length album consisting of repertoire they themselves selected.

The three-EP releases feature a broad variety of repertoire; Tao chose a pair of Debussy preludes, followed by Stravinsky’s Three Movements from ‘Petrushka’ (a piano arrangement of music from the ballet of the same name), and closing with a work composed by Conrad himself, Three Songs. Appleby recorded a trio of Schubert songs and Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. Lee recorded Richard Strauss’ Sonata for Violin & Piano in Eb major, a work written when the composer was the same age as Lee is now.