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    5 Classical Music Albums to Hear Right Now

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    Listen to Anna Netrebko’s new solo recording, Brahms clarinet and piano works, and Renaissance quartet arrangements.‘Amata dalle Tenebre’Anna Netrebko, soprano; Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala; Riccardo Chailly, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The soprano Anna Netrebko has always been more satisfying in person — her voice blooms in the vast space of an opera house — than on recordings, where her super-wide vibrato feels, in close-up, less expressive than unsteady. On her new solo album she struggles to sustain the long, lush lines of “Es gibt ein Reich,” from “Ariadne auf Naxos”; soft phrases waver in “Ritorna vincitor” (“Aida”) and “When I am laid in earth” (“Dido and Aeneas”); “Un bel dì,” from “Madama Butterfly,” is shaky from start to finish; high notes are difficult throughout. She endures “Einsam in trüben Tagen” (“Lohengrin”) with steely determination, and the exuberant “Dich, teure Halle” (“Tannhäuser”) similarly seems to press her to her limits.But there is still time for Netrebko, 50, to do a staged “Queen of Spades,” excerpted with focused passion here. And the “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde,” while audibly challenging for her, is movingly — and, at moments, ecstatically — negotiated. Given a meaty stretch to shine in the “Tristan” prelude, the orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala, under its music director, Riccardo Chailly, is otherwise mellow and very much in the background. “Sola, perduta, abbandonata” (“Manon Lescaut”) and especially “Tu che le vanità” (“Don Carlo”) convey, with generous, fiery, largely secure singing, the urgency of Netrebko’s best live performances. ZACHARY WOOLFEBach, HandelSabine Devieilhe, soprano; Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Erato)Recorded in a Paris church days after a lockdown in France ended last December, this moving release of Bach cantatas and Handel arias is surely one of the most affecting albums to emerge from the pandemic. Opening with the soprano Sabine Devieilhe and the lutenist Thomas Dunford bewailing Christ’s agonies on the cross in the song “Mein Jesu! was vor Seelenweh,” and ending in a blaze of trumpet-topped praise with the “Alleluja” that concludes the cantata “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen,” the album’s narrative arc — from sinfulness and repentance to faith and joy — is immensely satisfying.Much of that is because of the supreme detailing that Pichon (Devieilhe’s husband) draws from his starry ensemble Pygmalion, including the benediction that Dunford wraps around Cleopatra in “Piangerò,” the second of her laments from “Giulio Cesare”; Matthieu Boutineau’s feistily impulsive organ solo in the sinfonia from “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal”; and the ethereal, almost cleansing violin of Sophie Gent in “Tu del Ciel ministro eletto,” the heart-stopping plea for mercy from “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno.” Devieilhe is at the core of it all, wielding her voice with flashing sharpness one moment, crushing tenderness the next. DAVID ALLEN‘Here With You’Anthony McGill, clarinet; Gloria Chien, piano (Cedille)Brahms had all but decided to retire from composing when, in the early 1890s, he became friendly with the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld and was inspired to write a series of major works, including two clarinet sonatas that have long been mainstays of the repertory.Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet, and the splendid pianist Gloria Chien offer vibrant and insightful performances of the sonatas on their new album. These works, like much of late Brahms, can come across as weighty and thick-textured, but this duo brings wonderful transparency to the scores. Even in dark, stormy episodes, McGill and Chien play with unforced fervor and eloquence.Particularly impressive is the way they convey the coherence of the final movement of the second sonata, written as a theme and variations — music that often seems awkwardly intricate, with curious turns and twists. The album also includes a glowing account of Jessie Montgomery’s mellow “Peace,” as well as an ebullient, dazzling yet unshowy performance of Weber’s virtuosic Grand Duo Concertant, which here sounds aptly grand. ANTHONY TOMMASINI‘Of All Joys’Attacca Quartet (Sony Classical)The Attacca Quartet’s name comes from the musical term for playing without a pause. And the group seems to be taking that literally: Their new album, “Of All Joys,” is their second this year after releasing their Sony Classical debut, “Real Life,” in July.“Real Life” was a shot of adrenaline, an electronic dance record that remixed music by the likes of Flying Lotus and took a refreshingly broad view of the string quartet form. “Of All Joys” — a juxtaposition of Renaissance arrangements and contemporary works by Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass — couldn’t be more different, yet its conceptual swerve from “Real Life” is fitting for an ensemble equally comfortable in Haydn and Caroline Shaw.Glass’s “Mishima” Quartet is the only proper string quartet on the new album, which takes its title from a line in the John Dowland song “Flow My Tears.” The rest is adaptation — an insistence on the elasticity of music, borne out with rich, organ-like sonorities in pieces like the Dowland or John Bennet’s “Weep, O Mine Eyes.”With a teeming “Mishima” at its heart, the album is also a testament to how few ingredients are needed to inspire emotional intensity — as in the players’ sudden shifts, during that quartet’s final movement, between churning arpeggios and streaks of lyricism. At the end of Pärt’s frosty “Fratres,” you might find yourself trying to reconcile the album’s title with its solemn sound world. But perhaps joy is something beyond mood; it may simply lie in the making of, and listening to, music. JOSHUA BARONE‘Phoenix’Stewart Goodyear, piano (Bright Shiny Things)Not many artists would place Mussorgsky, Debussy, Jennifer Higdon and Anthony Davis on the same album. But the pianist Stewart Goodyear intriguingly locates in all of them — as well as in two pieces by Goodyear himself, inspired by his Trinidadian roots — the fundamental influence of Liszt.Goodyear’s playing here has both virtuosic flash and deeply considered feeling. When approaching Davis’s “Middle Passage” — after the poem of the same name by Robert Hayden — he handles the more improvisatory sections with a pugilistic force indebted to Davis’s own 1980s reading on the Gramavision label. But Goodyear also treats Davis with a meditative touch that calls to mind the lush rendition of “Middle Passage” recorded by Ursula Oppens, who commissioned the piece.The final line of Hayden’s poem, “Voyage through death to life upon these shores,” gives a sense of the emotional range of the rest of the album. Selections from Debussy gambol and ruminate; Higdon’s “Secret and Glass Gardens” moves from a guarded interiority to brash, attention-grabbing declarations. And Goodyear’s performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” likewise covers much ground, including a delightful “Ballet of Unhatched Chicks” and a stately “Great Gate of Kiev.” SETH COLTER WALLS More

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      At 75, the Ojai Music Festival Stays Focused on the Future

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      This storied California haven of contemporary classical music returned, organized by the composer John Adams.OJAI, Calif. — Returning is a process. Rarely is it linear.The Ojai Music Festival, for instance, returned, Sept. 16-19, to celebrate its 75th year after a long pandemic absence. But there were setbacks among the comebacks. Compromises were made to accommodate its move from spring to the final days of summer. An artist was held up in Spain by travel restrictions. Diligently enforced safety measures slightly harshed the vibe of this storied event, a rigorous yet relaxing haven for contemporary music tucked in an idyllic valley of straight-faced mysticism and sweet Pixie tangerines.This edition of the festival is the first under the leadership of Ara Guzelimian, back at the helm after a run in the 1990s. Each year, the person in his position organizes the programming with a new music director; for Guzelimian’s debut, he chose the composer John Adams, the paterfamilias of American classical music, who happens to have been born the year of the first festival. Uninterested in a retrospective for the milestone anniversary, they billed their concerts as a forward-looking survey of young artists — fitting for a festival that has long focused on the future.But in music, past, present and future are always informing one another. Bach and Beethoven haunted new and recent works; the pianist Vikingur Olafsson treated Mozart, as he likes to say, as if the ink had just dried on the score. There is no looking forward without looking back.The Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie led a storytelling hour on a misty field at Soule Park on Friday.Timothy TeagueGuzelimian and Adams looked back about far as possible in weaving the valley’s Indigenous history into the festival. The cover of its program book was the Cindy Pitou Burton photograph “Ghost Poppy” — the flower’s name given by the Chumash people, the first known inhabitants of this area, who after the arrival of Europeans were nearly annihilated by disease and violence, and who no longer have any land in Ojai.It’s a history that was shared, among more lighthearted tales, by the Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, who opened Friday’s programming with storytelling on a misty field at Soule Park; that evening, she began a concert with a blessing.Despite the best of intentions, these were among the more cringe-worthy moments of the festival. The predominantly white, moneyed audience responded to details of colonial brutality with an obliviously affirmative hum, not unlike the way it later cheered on Rhiannon Giddens’s “Build a House,” a searing and sweeping indictment of American history — as if these listeners weren’t implicated in its message.Members of the Attacca Quartet with Giddens and her partner, Francesco Turrisi.Timothy TeagueThe festival was at its best when the music spoke for itself. (Most of the concerts are streaming online.) It should be said, though, that the programming still had its limits; just as this review can’t possibly address the entire event, Ojai’s three days (and a brief prelude the evening before) represented only a sliver of the field, and excluded some of the thornier, more experimental work being done.Adams was nevertheless interested, it seemed, in artists who operate as if liberated from orthodoxy and genre — far from what he has called “the bad old days” of modernism’s grip.Beyond the composers, that translated to the performers, a roster that included the festival orchestra (no mere pickup group with the brilliant violinist Alexi Kenney as its concertmaster); members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group; and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. And soloists like the violinist — for one piece, also a violist — Miranda Cuckson, who summoned the force of a full ensemble in Anthony Cheung’s “Character Studies” and Dai Fujikura’s “Prism Spectra,” and nimbly followed Bach’s Second Partita with Kaija Saariaho’s “Frises” in place of the partita’s famous Chaconne finale.The violinist Miranda Cuckson in Samuel Adams’s Chamber Concerto, conducted by his father, John Adams.Timothy TeagueOlafsson, whose recordings have demonstrated his brilliance as a programmer — with a sharp ear for connections within a single composer’s body of work, or across centuries and genres — persuasively moderated a conversation among Rameau, Debussy and Philip Glass, as well as another of Mozart and his contemporaries, with masterly voicing and enlightening clarity.Giddens was also at ease in a range of styles, her polymathic musicality and chameleonic voice deployed as affectingly in an Adams aria as in American folk. Performing with her own band (whose members include Francesco Turrisi, her partner) she was deadpan and charismatic; alongside the Attacca Quartet, she simply sat at a microphone with a laser-focus stare, commanding the stage with only her sound.Attacca’s appearance was all too brief, but could justify their own turn at directing the festival one day. Whether in works by Adams, Jessie Montgomery or Caroline Shaw, in Paul Wiancko’s vividly episodic “Benkei’s Standing Death” or Gabriella Smith’s jam-like “Carrot Revolution,” these open-eared and open-minded players don’t seem to bring a piece to the stage until it is etched into their bones, so fully is each score embodied.There was overlap of composer and performer in Timo Andres, whose works were well represented but who also served as the soloist — twinkling, patient and tender — in Ingram Marshall’s humbly gorgeous piano concerto “Flow.”Andres later gave a chilly Sunday morning recital that opened with selections from “I Still Play,” a set of miniatures written for Robert Hurwitz, the longtime and influential leader of Nonesuch Records. It continued with one of Samuel Adams’s Impromptus, a work of inspired keyboard writing designed to complement Schubert, with flashes of that composer along with warmth and subtle harmonic shading to match. And it ended with the first live performance of Smith’s “Imaginary Pancake,” which had a respectable debut online early in the pandemic but truly roared in person.In very Ojai fashion, there were so many living composers programmed that Esa-Pekka Salonen didn’t even qualify as a headliner. If anything, he was a known quantity that unintentionally faded amid the novelty of other voices. Carlos Simon’s propulsive and galvanizing “Fate Now Conquers” nodded to Beethoven, but on his own brazen terms. And there continues to be nothing but promise in the emerging Inti Figgis-Vizueta, whose “To give you form and breath,” for three percussionists, slyly warped time in a juxtaposition of resonant and dull sounds of found objects like wood and planters.Much real estate was given to Gabriela Ortiz, who in addition to being performed — providing a blissfully rousing climax for the festival with an expanded version of her “La calaca” on Sunday evening — stepped in as a curator when a recital by Anna Margules was canceled because she couldn’t travel to the United States. That concert, a survey of Mexican composers, offered one of the festival’s great delights: the percussionist Lynn Vartan in Javier Álvarez’s “Temazcal,” a work for maracas and electronics that demands dance-like delivery in a revelation of acoustic possibilities from an instrument most people treat as a mere toy.From left, Emily Levin, Abby Savell and Julie Smith Phillips in Gabriela Ortiz’s “Río de la Mariposas.”Timothy TeagueOrtiz’s chamber works revealed a gift for surprising acoustic pairings, such as two harps and a steel plan in “Río de las Mariposas,” which opened a late morning concert on Sunday. It’s a sound that had a sibling in a premiere that ended that program: Dylan Mattingly’s “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum,” its title taken from the “Aeneid.”The work is also for two harps (Emily Levin and Julie Smith Phillips) — but also two pianos that, microtonally detuned, could at times be confused with a sound of steel pan. There is a slight dissonance, but not an unpleasant one; the effect is more like the distortion of memory. And there was nothing unpleasant about this cry for joy. Ecstasy emanated from the open pianos, played by Joanne Pearce Martin and Vicki Ray, as they were lightly hammered at their uppermost registers, joined by music-box twinkling in the harps.The mood turned more meditative in the comparatively subdued middle section, but the transporting thrill of the opening returned at the end: first in fragments, then full force. “Sunt Lacrimae Rerum” was the newest work at the festival, a piece that looked back on a year that was traumatic for all of us. But Mattingly met the moment with music that teemed with defiant, unflappable hope for the future. More

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      For Music, a Fall Deluge of Performances Is Beginning

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      Summer has been quiet, but the weekend brought some brilliant concerts. (Delta variant be damned.)The summertime classical calendar tends to be light even under normal circumstances — so during a lingering pandemic, it can seem almost nonexistent.But now comes the deluge, Delta variant be damned. Over the past few days, New York audiences had the chance to catch live sets from two well-regarded groups presenting fresh repertoire. And those sets had connections to even more worthy ensembles debuting new material.On Saturday the Attacca Quartet played a heavily amplified yet lovingly textured program for hundreds in Prospect Park, as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival. (The pop group San Fermin headlined the evening.) In a half-hour sprint that managed not to feel rushed, the group played excerpts from its July debut on the Sony Classical label: the dance music-suffused (but somehow not schticky) “Real Life.”Joined for some selections by the percussionist Shayna Dunkelman, Attacca performed propulsive arrangements of music by Flying Lotus, and an excerpt from Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 — featured on the group’s next Sony album, out in November. The set was balanced with tender movements from Caroline Shaw’s “Plan and Elevation,” which the quartet recorded for the Nonesuch and New Amsterdam labels in 2019.Sunday evening brought the New York City premiere of the composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey’s “For George Lewis,” performed by Alarm Will Sound on the final night of this year’s Time Spans festival, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan. The group’s recording of the work came out nearly simultaneously on the Cantaloupe label, so “For George Lewis” registered not only as a clear highlight of the concerts I caught during the final week of Time Spans, but also of the year in albums.The piece stands on its own, though here’s a bit of context. When Lewis, a composer, improviser and scholar, released the electroacoustic “Homage to Charles Parker” in 1979, his tribute didn’t waste any time imitating Parker’s quicksilver sound. With Lewis playing trombone, organ and electronics, his austere then emotive work managed to honor its dedicatee by generating new stylistic possibilities within an existing tradition — just as Parker had done.Now Sorey, long mentored by Lewis, has echoed the favor. Largely constructed from slowly but steadily alternating pools of close-harmony dissonance, “For George Lewis” doesn’t immediately recall Lewis’s recent wry, riotous music for orchestra and chamber ensembles. And though its overall arc moves gradually from grit to melodic flowering, Sorey’s aesthetic also remains distinct from Lewis’s Parker homage.Instead, as “Homage to Charles Parker” was true to Lewis, so “For George Lewis” is true to Sorey. The fully notated piece has close connections to the music that Sorey has composed for his own improvising trio, on albums like “Alloy.” The first minute and change of “For George Lewis” is dominated by sustained flute tones, and brooding piano figures redolent of somber ritual. But the subtle addition of a pair of vibraphonists quickly banishes any sense of things being on autopilot. Nearly (but not quite) synchronous hits from each mallet-wielding player give the still-quiet dynamics a crucial edge.

      For George Lewis | Autoschediasms by Alarm Will Sound & Tyshawn SoreyThese are the kinds of details that keep “For George Lewis” feeling urgent over its nearly hourlong duration. On Saturday, in the intimate room at the DiMenna Center, I savored evidence of Sorey’s catholic tastes. Pungently vibrating violins were reminiscent of early Minimalist pioneers like Tony Conrad; occasionally plunging complexity in the woodwinds had the dramatic verve of later Stockhausen; toward the end, lines for a mellow fluegelhorn recalled the Miles Davis of “Miles Ahead.” But the pacing — and the attentiveness to timbral blends — was pure Sorey.The rest of Alarm Will Sound’s new album is no less striking. A second disc is devoted to Sorey’s “Autoschediasms” pieces. Inspired by the “Conduction” system developed (and trademarked) by Butch Morris and the “language music” of Anthony Braxton, these improvisational pieces, cued by Sorey as conductor, need the right interpreters. And Alarm Will Sound has become, to my ear, one of his greatest partners for such exercises — whether live or over videoconferencing software.“Autoschediasms” wasn’t the only reminder of Butch Morris’s influence over the weekend. Before the Attacca Quartet’s set, I saw the veteran avant-rock, funk and jazz outfit Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber perform twice at the Brooklyn Museum, part of the opening celebration for the touring exhibition of Barack and Michelle Obama’s official portraits.The veteran avant-rock, funk and jazz outfit Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber performed at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday.Kolin MendezA group of 15 instrumentalists and vocalists were led by the group’s co-founder and conductor, Greg Tate, the pathbreaking cultural critic who cites Morris’s “Conduction” style as the glue that holds together Bunt Sugar’s post-everything aesthetic. Aspects of Sun Ra and Funkadelic commingled from one moment to the next, with Tate using Morris-inspired gestures to spur sudden deviations from the band’s recorded versions. During the final minutes of “Angels Over Oakanda,” the title track from the group’s coming Sept. 23 release, Tate sped up the already heated rendition into a new realm of fervid frenzy.Veterans of both the Time Spans festival and of Burnt Sugar’s past lineups appeared together on another album released over the weekend.The Wet Ink Ensemble cellist Mariel Roberts (who premiered a new piece at Time Spans) and the former Burnt Sugar violinist Mazz Swift have each contributed strong solo features to the composer and saxophonist Caroline Davis’s stirring new album “Portals Vol. 1: Mourning,” released by the Sunnyside imprint.Roberts’s scabrous then lyrical cello can be heard on “Hop On Hop Off,” while Swift’s improvisatory contributions help start the track “Left.” But as with both Sorey and Burnt Sugar, improvisation is only part of the draw. The rest comes from Davis’s supple compositional art — which mixes muscular dexterity with emotional vulnerability in a way that’s rare in both the contemporary chamber music and improvisational scenes.A version of the group heard on “Portals” — which incorporates a string quartet plus Davis’s regular improvising quintet — will appear at the Jazz Gallery on Sept. 10. But even for those who are not yet comfortable attending concerts, the album version is a sign among many that at-home listening, too, is gaining energy with the coming of fall. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in April

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      Bach two ways, the composer Tania León and a Philip Glass adaptation of Kafka are among the highlights.With a widespread return to indoor, in-person performances still a ways off, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in April. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘St. John Passion’April 2 at 9 a.m.; dg-premium.com; available through April 4.This concert sells itself: John Eliot Gardiner, one of the finest Bach interpreters in the world, leading his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the “St. John Passion” — on Good Friday, no less. Not always as popular, and always more controversial, than its sibling “St. Matthew Passion,” the “St. John” is nonetheless a work that Gardiner feels passionately about. As he wrote in his book “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” it is “as bold and complex an amalgam of storytelling and meditation, religion and politics, music and theology, as there has ever been.” JOSHUA BARONEAttacca QuartetApril 6 at 7 p.m.; millertheatre.com; available indefinitely.The Attacca players seem incapable of putting on a dull concert; one of the final live performances I heard before last year’s lockdown featured them in joyous mastery of Caroline Shaw’s string quartets. That was at the Miller Theater, which is hosting this livestream of selections from John Adams’s “John’s Book of Alleged Dances”; Gabriella Smith’s rhapsodic jam session “Carrot Revolution”; and “Benkei’s Standing Death,” a 2020 work by Paul Wiancko, whose “Lift” teems with understanding of and affection for the string-quartet tradition. JOSHUA BARONE‘Pelléas et Mélisande’April 9 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; available through Oct. 9.We usually associate the phrase “period instruments” with the Baroque era. But changes in musical technology have been continuous and profound through the ages, such that there can be revelatory performances of “period Beethoven” or “period Wagner” — or period Debussy! François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, have long tailored their interpretations — and the instruments they use — to different works they play. They have recorded Debussy as he might have sounded at the turn of the 20th century, and now take on his epochal 1902 “Pelléas” for Opéra de Lille, directed (and with starkly elegant sets designed) by Daniel Jeanneteau. ZACHARY WOOLFETania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, is among the works that The Orchestra Now will play in a streamed concert on April 10.Miranda Barnes for The New York TimesThe Orchestra NowApril 10 at 8 p.m.; theorchestranow.org; available on demand from April 15 through May 30.This impressive ensemble of graduate students at Bard College presents a characteristically adventurous program, conducted by Leon Botstein. It opens with Tania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, followed by Bernstein’s “Serenade”: a rumination on Plato’s “Symposium” that takes the form of an intense, episodic violin concerto, with Zongheng Zhang as soloist. The brilliant pianist Blair McMillen appears in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a terrific but seldom performed piece. The program ends with Mendelssohn’s spirited “Scottish” Symphony. ANTHONY TOMMASINIBenjamin ApplApril 12 at 8 a.m.; wigmore-hall.org.uk; available through May 12.When this German baritone sang Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” cycle at the Park Avenue Armory two years ago, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times that he “had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice.” If you, like me, missed that performance, another opportunity beckons with this livestream from Wigmore Hall in London. Appl will have, in the pianist James Baillieu, the same partner as at the Armory, so we’ll see if he can cast the same spell over the screen. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘In the Penal Colony’April 15 at 12:01 a.m.; philipglasscenterpresents.org; available indefinitely.In the past, I’ve found the recording of this Philip Glass “pocket opera,” adapted from Kafka’s short story, to be a bit of a slog. But a staging can make all the difference, particularly when dealing (as here) with a talky libretto. This 2018 production by Opera Parallèle — presented as part of this year’s digital edition of Glass’s Days and Nights Festival — has turned me around on the work. Thanks to a strong pair of lead performances and a simple yet effective black-box set, Kafka’s bureaucratized dystopia shines through with a fresh lacquer of bleak humor. SETH COLTER WALLSSan Francisco SymphonyApril 15 at 1 p.m.; sfsymphonyplus.org; available indefinitely.The pandemic waylaid this orchestra’s splashy plans to welcome Esa-Pekka Salonen as its new music director. But with its own streaming service now up and running, San Francisco is giving Salonen a chance — however curtailed — to start defining his tenure. For this SoundBox program, he is focusing on ideas of musical patterning. While the program includes some well-worn Minimalist favorites by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the most intriguing item is a premiere from Salonen himself: “Saltat sobrius,” a fantasy on Pérotin’s medieval “Sederunt Principes.” SETH COLTER WALLSJeremy Denk’s Bach concert, presented by Cal Performances, will be available starting April 15.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesJeremy DenkApril 15 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available through July 14.The first book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” was to have dominated this pianist’s 2020 performance schedule. That, of course, was not to be, but last spring, he nevertheless produced a series of streams related to the capacious work. He returns to it in its totality for this concert, presented by Cal Performances. ZACHARY WOOLFEHallé OrchestraApril 29 at 7 a.m.; thehalle.vhx.tv; available through July 29.All three of the Hallé’s streams this month will be worth watching, including the premiere of Huw Watkins’s Symphony No. 2, available from April 15. But this last program of the season is the most ambitious: an account of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” filmed on location across the orchestra’s hometown, Manchester, England. Composed amid the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Stravinsky asks for small forces: just seven instrumentalists backing three actors and a dancer. Mark Elder conducts, and Annabel Arden and Femi Elufowoju Jr. direct. DAVID ALLENChamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterApril 29 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through May 6.This program is billed as “Monumental Trios,” and that’s no exaggeration. Beethoven’s Trio in E-flat (Op. 70, No. 2) is a majestic, searching and, at times, alluringly quizzical work. The superb pianist Juho Pohjonen joins the violinist Paul Huang and the cellist Jakob Koranyi in a performance taped in 2015. Brahms’s Trio No. 1 in B, composed in 1854 and revised in 1889, offers music by this composer in his brash early days — then modulated some 35 years later, once he was a probing, mature master. The performance by the pianist Orion Weiss, the violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Carter Brey is from 2017. ANTHONY TOMMASINI More