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      Review: Grammy-Winning ‘Akhnaten’ Returns to the Met Opera

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      Philip Glass’s portrait of a pathbreaking pharaoh returns to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since its hit debut there in 2019.It wasn’t so long ago this season — just January — that the Metropolitan Opera’s programming was about as classic as it gets: tried-and-true works by Verdi, Puccini and Mozart.But scan the coming weeks, and you’ll find what looks like a better, more adventurous company. On Thursday, Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” returned for the first time since its Met debut, in 2019, joining the American premiere last week of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Next to open, on May 30, is a revival of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” in a staging by Jonathan Miller that is older but more stylish than many at the house. By June, “Rigoletto” will stand alone as a holdout of the core repertory.While a break from the Met’s standard programming, “Akhnaten” — the final installment, from 1984, in Glass’s trilogy of “portrait” operas, after the pathbreaking “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha,” a meditation on Gandhi’s nonviolent movement — may be a surer bet than, say, “Tosca.” When “Akhnaten” belatedly arrived there a few years ago, it was a critical and box office success, one that attracted a visibly younger audience.That run eventually made its way onto a recording that recently won a Grammy Award. This revival is something of a victory lap, with the same conductor and nearly the same cast. Even Thursday’s audience seemed transported from those earlier days. With artists like Erin Markey and Justin Vivian Bond mingling on the theater’s promenade, the scene was more Joe’s Pub than Lincoln Center.There were, though, some crucial differences from 2019. Phelim McDermott’s production, now more lived-in, unfolded with elegant inevitability rather than effort; the score was executed with a clarity and drive absent on the often slack album. And while “Akhnaten” may be one of Glass’s tributes to great men who changed the world — through science, politics and faith — Thursday’s performance of it made a persuasive argument for where the real power lies: with the women.For example, the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb, the cast’s newcomer, as Nefertiti, Akhnaten’s wife. Long presented at the Met in operas from the 18th and 19th centuries, she was singing a new kind of role on Thursday, one she seized with assurance and ringing might. As a partner for Anthony Roth Costanzo, the countertenor who has a virtual monopoly on the title role in this production, her lush, vibrato-rich sound was a productive contrast to his ethereal purity — she grounded and he celestial, they met somewhere in the middle for their long, hypnotically sensual love duet.More powerful yet was the soprano Disella Larusdottir as Queen Tye, Akhnaten’s mother. Penetrating and resonant, she shot out burst-like phrases with nearly mechanical exactitude and endurance, but was also expressive within the discipline. It’s Akhnaten, pioneering a kind of monotheism in his worship of the sun god Aten, who banishes the priests from the temple in Act II. On Thursday, though, the attack seemed to come from Queen Tye, so frightening and forceful was Larusdottir in her delivery.The conductor Karen Kamensek held together what can be an unwieldy production and led a Met Orchestra much more reliably capable than in 2019. She and the ensemble set the tone with the opera’s mood-altering, time-bending prelude. On the recording, propulsive, shifting arpeggios come off as sluggish, with lapses of legato phrasing. Returned to with more experience, along with noticeably more control, the score moved along with crisp transparency and a tense momentum that didn’t let up in the first act. The instrumentalists still have work to do, though. As the show went on, the strings occasionally slid into soft articulation; and the brasses suffered from clumsiness and imprecision, mistakes that can’t be hidden in music that lives or dies on accuracy.McDermott’s production similarly exposes its performers: not only the singers but also a dozen jugglers in catsuits, including Sean Gandini, the show’s choreographer. As scrappy as it is ornate, the staging — with imaginative, thrift-store-find costumes by Kevin Pollard and sets to match by Tom Pye, and artful lighting by Bruno Poet — demands the patience and steadiness of yoga in its movement, as well as an active eye for anyone watching. (At one point, one of Gandini’s people balances atop a large rolling wheel while, on scaffolding above, jugglers toss balls as the chorus does a version of the same thing; playing out amid the spectacle is the funeral of Akhnaten’s father.)It can be a lot to take in, and the metaphor of juggling — its spheres redolent of Akhnaten’s precious sun, their constant and unpredictable motion as precarious as his reign — proves its point too quickly to go on for as long as it does. As ritual, it doesn’t achieve the transcendence of McDermott’s “Satyagraha,” one of the Met’s finest productions, a staging whose visual diversity and inventiveness give way to sublime austerity.Zachary James, left, with Costanzo and members of the juggling ensemble led by Sean Gandini.Ken HowardThe choreography, though, does have its awe-inspiring moments, such as when juggling pins fly around Aaron Blake, as the High Priest of Amon, who — despite the risk of being hit by one — doesn’t even suggest a flinch while singing with a full-bodied tenor sound. Blake’s character is joined by Aye (the bass Richard Bernstein) and General Horemhab (the baritone Will Liverman) to form a tripartite resistance to Akhnaten’s rule, inciting the revolt that ends it and restores the old religious order. The arc of the pharaoh’s reign is recounted in spoken passages by Zachary James, whose towering presence and booming declamations feel thrillingly neither of this time nor world.James assumes the role of a lecturing professor near the opera’s ending, while Costanzo’s Akhnaten appears as a museum display. This is how we remember, McDermott is saying: through history, through exhibition, through the pageantry of opera performance. Glass makes his own version of that point with the centerpiece aria, “Hymn to the Sun,” a setting of a prayer to Aten that ends with an offstage chorus singing the text of Psalm 104 — tracing a direct line from Akhnaten to the monotheism that dominates today.As if that weren’t enough to place Akhnaten in the pantheon of great innovators, the final scene’s music introduces a subtle quotation from “Einstein on the Beach.” Here, Glass doesn’t tidily package his “portraits” trilogy as much as acknowledge it. On Thursday, though, that intrusion was also a reminder: After the triumphs of “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” when will the Met and McDermott give Einstein his due with a production of his own?AkhnatenThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in June

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      The Met Orchestra’s return, an opera from Paris and a Philip Glass circus work are among the highlights.With in-person performances just beginning to return in many places, here are 10 highlights of the online music content coming in June. (Times listed are Eastern.)Dallas Symphony Orchestra/Met OrchestraAvailable through June 4; dallassymphony.org.One of the most dramatic musical coups of the pandemic came a month ago, when players from the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra — which went unpaid for nearly a year — traveled to Texas to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for benefit performances of Mahler’s First Symphony. It was a reunion with Fabio Luisi, who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years and is now the music director in Dallas. The filmed result is fresh, vivid and cumulatively quite moving. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Circus Days and Nights’June 1 at noon; malmoopera.se; there are several more livestreamed performances through June 13.Circus juggling was one of the highlights of Phelim McDermott’s recent staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Akhnaten.” Might that have given Glass a new idea? Whether it’s coincidence or not, his latest stage work — a collaboration with the librettist David Henry Hwang and the circus director Tilde Bjorfors — is being advertised as a “never-before-seen fusion of circus and opera,” streamed live from the Malmo Opera in Sweden. SETH COLTER WALLS‘Desert In’June 3 at noon; operabox.tv; available indefinitely.Filmed opera continues to take pandemic-prompted steps forward, including this pivot to episodic narrative. Available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv platform, “Desert In” is an eight-part mini-series in which a married couple runs what is described as “a mysterious motor lodge where guests pay to be reunited with lost loves.” (The episodes, projected to last between 10 and 20 minutes each, will roll out on a weekly basis, two at a time.) The rotating creative team is promising, with composers like Nathalie Joachim and Nico Muhly taking turns writing episodes, for a cast that includes the star mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and the cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. SETH COLTER WALLSDetroit Symphony OrchestraJune 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.; dso.org; available through June 17 and 18.Kent Nagano, an insightful and dynamic conductor, is presenting two 45-minute programs with the Detroit Symphony — both of which, in characteristic Nagano style, offer intriguing pairings of old and new. On June 3 he leads Toshio Hosokawa’s Percussion Intermezzo from “Stilles Meer,” an opera written in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, alongside Schubert’s ebullient Fifth Symphony. The next day he pairs Britten’s “Fanfare for St. Edmundsbury” with Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Britten,” before concluding with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, with the elegant pianist Gilles Vonsattel as soloist. ANTHONY TOMMASINIAdam Barnett-Hart of the Escher String Quartet, which livestreams a program of Bartok and Sibelius on June 10.Ian Douglas for The New York TimesEscher String QuartetJune 10 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through June 17.Scheduled for December of last year, before the pandemic intervened, the exciting Escher String Quartet performs live from the Rose Studio under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The program opens with Bartok’s final quartet, first performed in 1941 and a work that arrestingly combines aching grief — his mother died and World War II was grimly unfolding — with teeming intensity. The concert ends with Sibelius’s unconventional and engrossing “Voces Intimae” in five movements, written in 1909. It’s the “kind of thing,” Sibelius wrote of this work, that “brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death.” ANTHONY TOMMASINIKronos FestivalJune 11 at 10 p.m.; kronosquartet.org; available through Aug. 31.Global in scope, this is the first of three meaty streamed programs which, together with some ancillary offerings and films, make up this intriguing festival of new work presented by the Kronos Quartet and its creative foundation. The premieres include music by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Mahsa Vahdat; other pieces are by Clint Mansell, Jlin and Pete Seeger (his sadly ever-relevant “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”). ZACHARY WOOLFE‘Le Soulier de Satin’June 14; chezsoi.operadeparis.fr; available indefinitely.As the summer sun invites you outside, the last thing you may want is to stare at a screen for over six hours. But if you have the patience — or if a rainy day keeps you indoors — set aside time for the Paris Opera’s latest premiere: the third in its cycle of works inspired by French literature, as well as Marc-André Dalbavie’s third opera. It’s an adaptation of Paul Claudel’s sprawling drama “Le Soulier de Satin” (“The Satin Slipper”) — in preview clips rich with misty orchestration and long melodies — directed by Stanislas Nordey, conducted by its composer and starring the bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and the mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux. JOSHUA BARONE‘Terra Nova’June 17 at 7:30 p.m.; 5bmf.org; available through Dec. 31.Those passing by the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza on a hot recent Saturday afternoon could experience an unexpectedly sophisticated new song cycle musing on the tangled history of exploration and colonization. Written by the bookish performer-composer collective Oracle Hysterical and played with the quartet Hub New Music, the sometimes propulsive, sometimes sultry music was superb when Majel Connery was airily singing, and foundered only in two long, talky sections at the end. It will be released for streaming in a version filmed at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on Staten Island. ZACHARY WOOLFETo close her time as composer in residence at the Chicago Symphony, Missy Mazzoli has planned two streaming concerts.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCSO SessionsJune 24 at 12:01 a.m.; cso.org/tv; available through July 23.Missy Mazzoli closes her tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s composer in residence with two rich streaming programs of new and recent music. This, the second of the concerts, includes the premiere of Courtney Bryan’s “Requiem,” which draws on different mourning traditions and is scored for vocal quartet, winds, brass and percussion; there are also works by Gilda Lyons, David Reminick and Tomeka Reid on offer. (The first program, which goes online June 10, is no slouch, either, featuring pieces by Nicole Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith and Mazzoli herself.) ZACHARY WOOLFEPhilharmonia OrchestraJune 24 and 25 at 2:30 p.m.; philharmonia.co.uk; available until Sept. 16 and 17.One of the great partnerships in music — the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra in London — ends in June with Salonen’s final concerts as principal conductor. (Rest assured, the group seems in good hands with his successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali.) Both programs are meaty affairs: one beginning with Beethoven’s First Symphony and ending with Sibelius’s Seventh, bookends to Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto (with Yefim Bronfman) and Stravinsky’s “Symphonies of Wind Instruments”; and the other surveying Bach through the eyes of 20th-century artists, along with the premiere of Salonen’s “Fog,” adapted for orchestra, and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, with Mitsuko Uchida the tantalizing soloist. JOSHUA BARONE More

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      A Jaw-Dropping Philip Glass Opera Is Finally on Video

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      “Satyagraha,” one of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest stagings of the 21st century, has been released on DVD and CD.For decades, Philip Glass fans have internalized a lesson: If you want to see his operas, plan to buy tickets and attend in person. Don’t expect the stagings to show up on DVD in a year or two, as most prominent productions do these days.Glass has long carefully husbanded the rights to his work. And since founding his own record label, Orange Mountain Music, in 2001, he has been selective regarding releases of some of his operas.This has been particularly glaring when it comes to his trilogy of what became known as “portrait” operas, the stage works of the 1970s and ’80s which made his reputation in the genre. Each is focused on the life of a consequential man of history: “Einstein on the Beach” is an abstract account of that scientist and the development of nuclear technology; “Satyagraha” dramatizes Gandhi’s early activism in South Africa; “Akhnaten” contemplates the Egyptian pharaoh who pioneered monotheism.Glass in 1984, the year “Akhnaten,” the follow-up to “Satyagraha” in his trilogy of “portrait” operas, premiered in Germany.Beatriz Schiller/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesA globe-trotting revival of Robert Wilson’s definitive original production of “Einstein” was released on video in 2016, a full 40 years after the work’s premiere. But while “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” have received acclaimed recent productions at the Metropolitan Opera, and have been transmitted to movie theaters worldwide through the Met’s Live in HD series, they have been missing on DVD.That is now changing, thanks to a deal struck between the Met, Orange Mountain Music and Dunvagen, Glass’s publishing company. Late in April, the Met released, for the first time, its 2011 “Satyagraha” staging, directed by Phelim McDermott, designed by Julian Crouch, first seen in New York in 2008 and quickly assessed to be one of the Met’s triumphs of the past 25 years.Scenes from the Metropolitan Opera’s production, which is newly available on video.“Satyagraha” is available on DVD and is also downloadable on Apple TV. The audio is available on CD, as well as through streaming services and digital-purchase storefronts. The Met and Dunvagen confirmed in emails that the deal also includes the release of “Akhnaten” across a similar range of formats next month.“Satyagraha,” which premiered in 1980 and was the middle child of Glass’s portrait trilogy, is where the composer began to write for more traditional operatic orchestral forces, and for unamplified voices. He left behind the fully non-narrative approach of “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), while maintaining that work’s stylized pageantry.The scenes of “Satyagraha” depict recognizable events in Gandhi’s life, but instead of a biopic-style libretto, the Sanskrit text is made up of selections from the Bhagavad Gita, which Glass said he imagined Gandhi pondering during his time in South Africa. In the first scene, for example, the text’s discourse on the morality of conflict is reflected, dreamscape-like, in the opera’s action, as Gandhi confronts his fears regarding direct political action. The use of the Bhagavad Gita throughout keeps the opera enigmatic and poetic, endowing Gandhi’s evolution from lawyer to activist with epic grandeur.“Satyagraha,” which premiered in 1980, is where its composer began to write for more traditional operatic orchestral forces, and for unamplified voices.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s “Satyagraha” realizes the work in a way that Achim Freyer’s 1981 staging in Stuttgart, Germany — long out of print on DVD — never really did. (Among other things, Freyer’s punk couture designs were never quite right for this opera, and have aged poorly.)In McDermott’s production for the Met, the images are dazzling throughout, with surreal, giant figures conjured out of newsprint in a gesture at Indian Opinion, the newspaper Gandhi founded. At the opera’s climax, the influence of Gandhi’s nonviolent protest on the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is rendered explicit with slow-motion, hushed profundity.Given the work’s stylization and the many repetitions of the text, the Sanskrit doesn’t need to be followed word by word to understand its implications. McDermott’s production selectively projected English translations onto the set, and the new DVD captures those projections well enough to do without full subtitling.Until now, the only available audio release of “Satyagraha” was a CBS Masterworks recording from 1985, which features synthesizers very prominently in the mix alongside the New York City Opera’s orchestra and chorus.That energetic recording and others from Glass’s CBS years did a lot to popularize his music. But is the nervy, aggressive, computer-age precision of the synthesizer on the CBS recording the best way to evoke Gandhi’s gradual organization of mass protests at the end of the second act? If you’re playing the music as background, perhaps it doesn’t matter. But if you’re tuned into the drama, the autopilot momentum of synths seems out of place in a story about such concerted effort and up-and-down struggle. The conductor Dante Anzolini, along with the Met’s orchestra and chorus and the tenor Richard Croft as Gandhi, create a more affecting groundswell (including a subtler use of synthesizer) over the same minutes.Through his career, Glass has emphasized adaptation — and the validity of multiple perspectives on his catalog. Creating a one-and-only approach has rarely been the goal. In his 2015 memoir, “Words Without Music,” he wrote, “This is what I know about new operas: The only safeguard for the composer is to have several productions.”If a work can survive its first decade, he adds, “we might begin to form an idea of the quality and stature of the work in its third or fourth production.” This was and remains a sadly rare phenomenon. The opera world loves its premieres; less so, its third or fourth productions of a contemporary piece.But Glass’s fame, and the quality of both “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” have allowed them to be explored again and again over the past four decades. This means that there will, inevitably, be interpretations that are stronger than others. This newly released “Satyagraha” is not just one of the best Met productions of the 21st century. It also immediately takes its place among the essential releases in the storied career of an instantly recognizable voice in contemporary music. 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