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    Review: Philharmonic Returns to Classics, at Its Own Expense

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    Led by Manfred Honeck, the orchestra all too quickly revisited Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and, with Vikingur Olafsson, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1.A risk of programming standard repertory works over and over is that an orchestra is practically begging to be compared with its own recent performances — not to mention a huge and ever-growing body of recordings. Why should someone buy a ticket to a concert if they just heard the same group do the same piece, or if they can stay home and listen to dozens of masterly versions online?That question came to mind on Friday, when the New York Philharmonic played Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at David Geffen Hall. Just over a year and a half ago, the ensemble did Beethoven’s Seventh at Geffen under Esa-Pekka Salonen — a stirring rendition that balanced accented force and long-lined legato into a propulsive, joyful whole.If the work came around every five or 10 years, it would be easier to judge each arrival in a vacuum. But the Philharmonic’s choice to perform it again so soon — its programming this season is particularly uninspired — meant that Friday’s concert, conducted by Manfred Honeck, was inevitably going to be held up against the last one.Honeck, who led without a score, is experienced in Beethoven’s classic; his 2015 recording with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, of which he is the longtime music director, is one of the finest in a crowded field. But under his baton, the Philharmonic didn’t come close to matching its February 2023 self, let alone Pittsburgh’s rich, vigorous example.In the first movement, Honeck lingered over pastoral passages, perhaps to try and provide respite from — and intensification of — the relentlessly rhythmic surrounding music. But the orchestra negotiated these transitions of speed and atmosphere in a way that was stiff, not agile. An unusually drawn-out tempo in the third movement’s contrasting Trio section could have conveyed wistful longing if the Philharmonic had fuller, creamier tone, but as it was the orchestra just seemed strained by the slowness.Honeck always approaches standards like this with fresh ideas. He presented the second movement as a hushed hymn rather than the traditional sturdy dirge, a choice that elicited extraordinarily soft, silky sound from a group that generally doesn’t like to whisper.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Vikingur Olafsson’s ‘Goldbergs’ Mesmerize Carnegie Hall

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      In his debut on the main Carnegie stage, Olafsson gave a spectacular reading of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.On Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, the pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations had everyone in a trance — including him.Playing from memory in his debut on Carnegie’s main stage, he swayed in a gentle reverie and hunched over the piano so intently that he almost touched his forehead to the keys. After the final movement, audience members applauded robustly as they got up to stand shoulder to shoulder. But hardly anyone moved to leave.The “Goldbergs,” which Bach “prepared for the soul’s delight of music lovers” according to the score’s title page, employ a circular logic. A graceful aria in the style of a sarabande goes through 30 variations. Each movement has two sections, and each section repeats once. Every third variation is a canon — itself a looping form — and the whole, massive work closes with the same aria that started it. The variations, all but three in the same major key, utilize roughly the same harmonic progression, so listeners are lulled by the shared cadence but also dazzled by the inventiveness that masks it. The overall effect is mesmeric.It’s a 75-minute summit of the piano literature, and Olafsson gave a spectacular concert of it. He already has an elegantly accomplished recording of the piece, and a live setting only revealed new layers in his interpretation: intensely emotional and intelligently paced, immaculate in its technique and organic in its phrasing. It was an artistic feat of contradictions that, in the end, felt deeply human. As he told The New York Times last fall, “Bach is not one thing; he’s everything at the same time.”With a malleable, mellow tone and bouncy bass lines, Olafsson was true to his word, exploring a tension between introversion and extroversion and giving each piece a dynamic topography.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, a Taste of Holiday Bounty

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      Stéphane Denève leads a program of extravagantly colorful French works, with the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson as the soloist in a Ravel concerto.Thanksgiving came a day early at the New York Philharmonic this year: the calories, the juicy fat, the whipped cream, the fun, the sense of endless bounty. The orchestra’s program at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday was an immersion in richness and in flashing, warming colors, and it left you like a good holiday dinner does: a little dazed, even happily drowsy, stumbling toward the subway truly full.Conducted by Stéphane Denève, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, the concert was très French — down to the tender Rameau encore played by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto in G. (The program repeats on Friday and Saturday.)At the center of that concerto is a time-suspending Adagio. But in Ólafsson’s performance, the dreaminess — the slight blur, the delicacy — bled into the two outer movements, too. Some pianists lean on the factory-machine regularity, the bright lucidity, of those parts to hammer home a contrast with the slow movement. But, as he also showed in a very different repertory at his Carnegie Hall debut in February, Ólafsson resists vivid contrasts.It’s not that his touch is diffuse; it’s as clean as marble. And it’s not that the tempos he and Denève chose for the framing movements were slower than normal. But the effect Ólafsson got throughout, of a kind of virtuosic reticence, could be described in the same words I used for his performance in February: a “silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.”“Céléphaïs” (2017), a nine-minute section from Guillaume Connesson’s symphonic poem inspired by the fantastical writings of H.P. Lovecraft, opened the concert with an extravagance that offers proof of the survival of the orchestrational panache of the French tradition: its lurid lushness and sly squiggles, brassy explosions and sensual strings.Connesson’s precursors in that tradition got a hearing after intermission. The audience even got a second helping: The big, sweet slice of cake that is the Suite No. 2 drawn from Albert Roussel’s 1930 ballet “Bacchus et Ariane” was followed by another slice, the Suite No. 2 from another mythological ballet of the early 20th century, Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé.”On paper this seemed like overindulgence; it kind of was, but who doesn’t like their potatoes two ways every now and again? And while there’s a familial similarity between these works, Roussel’s style is ever so slightly more angular, with an underlying feeling of logic distinct from Ravel’s billowy scene painting.The Philharmonic played well throughout, riding the many waves and swerves of intensity and pigment, from dewy dawns to mellow dusks. There were some particularly notable contributions to the potluck: Ryan Roberts, just a few years into his tenure as the orchestra’s English hornist but already a pillar of the ensemble, matched Ólafsson’s eloquent introspection in the Ravel concerto’s slow movement.The principal flute, Robert Langevin, unspooled his instrument’s classic glistening solo in “Daphnis et Chloé” with conversational ease. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, had a russet-color turn in the Roussel, and Roger Nye, unusually seated in the first bassoon chair for that work, played with honeyed serenity.Unlike at most Thanksgiving dinners, by the end the fullness didn’t feel like bloat. The clear, cool acoustics of the new Geffen Hall work against textures getting too heavy; they favor breezy sleekness, which is perfect for Denève, whose music-making exudes relaxation without losing forward motion. A couple of hours later, I would have been more than ready to eat — I mean hear — some more.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Review: A Pianist Explores Mozart the Late Bloomer

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      Víkingur Ólafsson made his Carnegie Hall debut with a hypnotically unfurling program based on his recent album “Mozart and Contemporaries.”Mozart, the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson deadpanned from the stage at Zankel Hall on Tuesday evening, was a “late bloomer.” The audience chuckled at the thought of one of history’s great child prodigies, dead at 35, taking a long time to find his gifts.It was the rare occasion I’ve heard a laugh during a recital. Most musicians seem a bit lost when you hand them a microphone. Ólafsson grabs it near the base and manipulates it confidently, like a stand-up comic: wry and self-deprecating.At 38, he has appeared little in New York, and never before at any of Carnegie Hall’s spaces. It is as a recording artist that many here have known him, an identity he embraced on Tuesday, playing without alteration — and, other than an intermission, without pause, as if you were listening to the CD — the program of his most recent album, “Mozart and Contemporaries.”His late bloomer comment was a joke, but only partly — fitting for a concert that focused on Mozart’s artistic growth in the 1780s, his final full decade. Ólafsson’s aim was both to bring the master down to earth — interspersing him with pieces from around the same time, in a similar style, by Haydn, C.P.E. Bach, Domenico Cimarosa and Baldassare Galuppi — and to elevate him back to the heavens, bathing the audience in just shy of 90 minutes of aching beauty.Yes, there was some variety, but not so much. Ólafsson’s enemy here is the traditional piano recital, defined by vivid contrasts — of period, of mood. His touch is acute and pearly, his attack is hardly muted when warranted, and not nearly all of this music is slow or mellow. Even so, “Mozart and Contemporaries” came off as an unbroken, unfurling, hypnotically broad, almost dreamlike silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.For the listener — particularly to the live version, its peaks and valleys smoother than on the recording — the feeling eventually approached that of an insect encased in amber: surrounded by beauty, even trapped by it. So much sublimity is hard to take.Which doesn’t mean it isn’t sublime — in the essayistic bursts of a Bach rondo or in the wintry-field longing of Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor (K. 397); the delicacy of that composer’s K. 494 Rondo or the dash of another, K. 485; an alert rendition of Haydn’s B minor Sonata; intimate movements from Galuppi and Cimarosa; and a clear, keen interpretation of Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” in C (K. 545).Ólafsson’s lucidity was ideal for the high spirits of the not even two minutes of Mozart’s K. 574 Gigue — but he also brought out its subtly sophisticated, world-spanning harmonies, the sense of bounding over an immense distance. (He said after intermission that the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen told him this is a “cosmic” gigue.)The second half was dominated by three expansive adagios, starting with Ólafsson’s arrangement of the slow movement from the String Quintet in G minor (K. 516). A movement from Galuppi’s Sonata in C minor (evoking, like so much of Scarlatti, the strum of a Spanish guitar) led into the intensity of Mozart’s Sonata in the same key (K. 457) — the obsessiveness of its finale, the snow-globe tenderness of its Adagio. Then came the brooding, singing Adagio in B minor (K. 540), and Liszt’s ivory-pristine transcription of the “Ave Verum Corpus.”“It’s very hard to play something after ‘Ave Verum,’” Ólafsson said, quieting the applause by sitting back down at the piano bench. And then, with perfect timing: “But it’s not impossible.”He did the slow movement from J.S. Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4, pealing yet contained, and superb.Víkingur ÓlafssonPerformed on Tuesday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. 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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      The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020Listen to our critics’ favorites from a year in which much of the energy in music came from recordings.Credit…The New York TimesAnthony Tommasini, Zachary Woolfe, Joshua Barone, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, David Allen and Dec. 17, 2020Thomas Adès: Berceuse from ‘The Exterminating Angel’“In Seven Days”; Kirill Gerstein, piano (Myrios)The composer Thomas Adès and the pianist Kirill Gerstein’s artistically fruitful friendship has given us two essential albums this year: the premiere recording of Mr. Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Mr. Gerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon); and this one, which includes a solo arrangement of the harrowing and slippery Berceuse from Mr. Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” JOSHUA BARONEBerceuse from “The Exterminating Angel”Myrios◆ ◆ ◆Bach: Cello Suite No. 4, GigueBach: Complete Cello Suites (Transcribed for Violin); Johnny Gandelsman, violin (In a Circle)From the beginning of this movement, ornamented with the insouciance of folk music, it’s difficult to resist tapping along with your foot. That urge doesn’t really leave throughout the rest of the six cello suites, lithely rendered here on solo violin by Johnny Gandelsman. This is Bach in zero gravity: feather-light and freely dancing. JOSHUA BARONESuite No. 4, GigueIn a Circle◆ ◆ ◆Beethoven: Symphony No. 2, Allegro moltoBeethoven: Symphonies and Overtures; Vienna State Opera Orchestra and others; Hermann Scherchen, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The few new Beethoven symphonies released in this, his 250th birthday year, have largely offered more evidence for the drab state of interpretive tastes today. Not so the rereleases — above all this remastered and exceptionally bracing cycle that was eons ahead of its time when it first came out in the 1950s. Scherchen’s Beethoven — like this Second Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — is fast, sleek and astonishing detailed, as exciting as anything set down since. DAVID ALLENSymphony No. 2, Allegro moltoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Nadia Boulanger: ‘Soir d’hiver’“Clairières: Songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger”; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Myra Huang, piano (Avie)After Lili Boulanger, the gifted French composer, died in 1918 at just 24, her devoted older sister Nadia suffered doubts about her own composing and turned to teaching. On this lovely recording, the tenor Nicholas Phan performs elegant songs by both sisters, ending with Nadia’s misty, rapturous “Soir d’hiver,” a 1915 setting of her poem about a young mother abandoned by her lover. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Soir d’hiver”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, RomanceChopin: Piano Concertos; Benjamin Grosvenor, piano; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Elim Chan, conductor (Decca)There’s pianism of historic caliber on this release, and another mark of Mr. Grosvenor’s breathtaking maturity, even though he is still in his 20s. Summoning playing of pure poetry, he lavishes on these concertos all his lauded sensitivity, innate sense of pace and effortless way with phrasing. He’s matched bar for bar by Ms. Chan, an impressive young conductor who makes an occasion of orchestral writing that in other hands sounds routine. DAVID ALLENPiano Concerto No. 1, RomanceDecca◆ ◆ ◆Duke Ellington: ‘Light’“Black, Brown and Beige”; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis (Blue Engine)If Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall performance of his “Black, Brown and Beige” remains matchless, its radio broadcast sound has dated, making the crispness of this faithful recent rendition worth savoring. Sterling interpretation and production values permit a fresh look at “Light,” including the elegant way Ellington weaves together motifs heard earlier in “Black,” just before a rousing finish. SETH COLTER WALLS“Light”Blue Engine◆ ◆ ◆Eriks Esenvalds: ‘Earth Teach Me Quiet’“Rising w/ the Crossing”; the Crossing (New Focus)Earlier this year, when singing together became just about the most dangerous thing you could do, Donald Nally, the magus behind the Crossing, our finest contemporary-music choir, began posting daily recordings from their archives. He called it “Rising w/ the Crossing,” also the title of an album of a dozen highlights. There’s David Lang’s eerily prescient reflection on the 1918 flu pandemic, performed last year, and Alex Berko’s stirring “Lincoln.” But I keep returning to Eriks Esenvalds’s dreamily unfolding appeal to the Earth, its text a prayer of the Ute people of the American Southwest: a work of true radiance, fired by the precision and passion of this spectacular group. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Earth Teach Me Quiet”New Focus◆ ◆ ◆Antoine Forqueray: ‘Jupiter’“Barricades”; Thomas Dunford, lute; Jean Rondeau, harpsichord (Erato)This is Baroque music as hard-rock jam: driving, intense, dizzying, two musicians facing off in a brash battle that raises both their levels. It is the raucous climax of an album that creates a new little repertory for lute and harpsichord duo, with arrangements of favorites and relative obscurities that highlight Thomas Dunford and Jean Rondeau’s sly, exuberant artistic chemistry. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Jupiter”Warner Classics◆ ◆ ◆Ash Fure: ‘Shiver Lung’“Something to Hunt”; International Contemporary Ensemble; Lucy Dhegrae and Alice Teyssier, vocalists (Sound American)I try not to be fussy with audio quality. But if anything calls for an exception, it’s this long-awaited collection of music by Ash Fure — works that experiment with how sounds are made and felt. So before hitting play, gather your focus, along with your best headphones or speakers, for an intensely visceral listening experience. JOSHUA BARONE“Shiver Lung”Sound American◆ ◆ ◆Handel: ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormentate’“Agrippina”; Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano; Il Pomo d’Oro; Maxim Emelyanychev, conductor (Erato)A shot of venom, boring its way into the brain: There are some arias that aim to soothe anxiety, but for pure cathartic transference of all the anger, fear and impotence that 2020 has sparked, this aria — “Thoughts, you torment me” — by the title character of Handel’s “Agrippina” is the ticket. The fiercely dramatic Joyce DiDonato brings her multihued mezzo and over-the-top embellishments to the music, while the period-instrument orchestra pushes things along with raw-edged insistence. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Pensieri, voi mi tormentate”Erato◆ ◆ ◆Handel: Harpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeHandel: Suites for Harpsichord; Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord (Mirare)Handel’s eight suites for harpsichord, published in 1720, haven’t always gotten as much attention or respect among performers as the keyboard works of Couperin, Rameau or, especially, Bach. Sometimes they’ve been viewed more or less as training exercises: good for technique but not quite sublime. Pierre Hantaï, known for his vivid Scarlatti, dispels the slightly derogatory preconceptions with suave danciness and lucid touch. ZACHARY WOOLFEHarpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeMirare◆ ◆ ◆David Hertzberg: ‘Is that you, my love?’“The Wake World”; Maeve Hoglund, soprano; Samantha Hankey, mezzo-soprano; Elizabeth Braden, conductor (Tzadik)With his playfully convoluted 2017 fairy tale opera “The Wake World,” David Hertzberg demonstrated that voluptuous, sweeping elements of grand opera could be reimagined for today. In the work’s swelling, shimmering climactic duet between a young seeker and her fairy prince, Ravel meets Messiaen, and Wagner meets Scriabin; the music is spiky, original and wondrous strange. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Is that you, my love?”Tzadik◆ ◆ ◆Nathalie Joachim: ‘Dam mwen yo’“Forward Music Project 1.0”; Amanda Gookin, cello (Bright Shiny Things)Even when brief and minimalist, Nathalie Joachim’s compositions cross complex ranges of emotion. Here, in a piece for cello (and vocals recorded by its composer), the somber cast of mood at the opening is complicated by a change in gait. The effect is akin to what you might feel inventing a new dance on the spot, while trudging through otherwise grim surroundings. SETH COLTER WALLS“Dam mwen yo”Bright Shiny Things◆ ◆ ◆George Lewis: ‘As We May Feel’“Breaking News”; Studio Dan (Hat Hut)Boisterous riffs and counter-riffs seem to suggest improvisatory practices; after all, this veteran artist has explored those practices. Yet George Lewis’s 25-minute joy ride is fully notated. And it was written for an Austrian ensemble which appreciates the chug and wail of Duke Ellington’s train-imitation music, as well as the rigors of extended-technique modernism. SETH COLTER WALLS“As We May Feel”Hat Hut◆ ◆ ◆Meredith Monk: ‘Downfall’“Memory Game”; Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble; Bang on a Can All-Stars (Cantaloupe Music)For almost 60 years, the composer and performer Meredith Monk has created works mainly for herself and her close circle, so it’s been an open question what will happen to those intricate, idiosyncratic pieces when she’s gone. This album of sympathetic but not slavish new arrangements — collaborations with the Bang on a Can collective — offers tantalizing experiments. The clarinetist Ken Thomson gives the hawing vocals of “Downfall,” part of Ms. Monk’s post-apocalyptic 1983 evening “The Games,” seductively sinister instrumental surroundings. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Downfall”Cantaloupe Music◆ ◆ ◆Tristan Perich: ‘Drift Multiply,’ Section 6“Drift Multiply” (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch)Music emerges out of snowdrifts of white noise on this mesmerizing track. Tristan Perich is one of the most innovative tinkerers in electronic music, creating works of vibrant mystery. In “Drift Multiply,” 50 violins interact with 50 loudspeakers connected to as many custom-built circuit boards that channel the sound into one-bit audio. The result is a constantly evolving landscape where sounds coalesce and prism, where the violins both pull into focus and blur into a soothing ether. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Drift Multiply,” Section 6New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: ‘Ferguson: Summer of 2014’“The Grey Land”; Numinous (New Amsterdam)Joseph C. Phillips Jr.’s “The Grey Land” is a stirring, stylistically varied mono-opera that draws on its composer’s reflections on being Black in contemporary America. The longest movement on the premiere recording makes an early textual reference to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” while dramatizing an expectant couple’s unease in the wake of the death of Michael Brown. SETH COLTER WALLS“Ferguson: Summer of 2014”New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2, Andantino“Silver Age”; Daniil Trifonov, piano; Mariinsky Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The thoughtful pianist Daniil Trifonov explores the music of Russia’s so-called “silver age” of the early 20th century on a fascinating album that offers various solo works and concertos by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The spacious yet fiendishly difficult first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto is especially exciting. ANTHONY TOMMASINIPiano Concerto No. 2, AndantinoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Rameau: ‘The Arts and the Hours’“Debussy Rameau”; Vikingur Olafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)Few musicians craft their albums with as much care as Vikingur Olafsson, whose “Debussy Rameau” is a brilliantly conceived, nearly 30-track conversation across centuries between two French masters. There is one modern intervention: Mr. Olafsson’s solo arrangement of an interlude from Rameau’s “Les Boréades” — tender and reverential, a wellspring of grace. JOSHUA BARONE“The Arts and the Hours”Deutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Jean-Féry Rebel: ‘Le Chaos’“Labyrinth”; David Greilsammer, piano (Naïve)In his riveting, aptly titled album “Labyrinth,” the formidable pianist David Greilsammer daringly juxtaposes pieces spanning centuries, from Lully to Ofer Pelz. The theme of the album is captured in Jonathan Keren’s arrangement of Rebel’s “Le Chaos,” which comes across like an early-18th-century venture into mind-spinning modernism. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Le Chaos”Naïve◆ ◆ ◆Rebecca Saunders: ‘Still’“Musica Viva, Vol. 35”; Carolin Widmann, violin; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Ilan Volkov, conductor (BR-Klassik)A renowned figure on Europe’s experimental music scene, Rebecca Saunders builds teeming systems of shimmying severity from the sparest melodic materials. In this live recording of her violin concerto, Carolin Widmann excels in fulfilling the score’s contrasting requirements of delicacy and power. Helping judge the balance is the conductor Ilan Volkov, an artist American orchestras might consider working with. SETH COLTER WALLS“Still”BR-Klassik◆ ◆ ◆Schubert: ‘Des Fischers Liebesglück’“Where Only Stars Can Hear Us: Schubert Songs”; Karim Sulayman, tenor; Yi-heng Yang, fortepiano (Avie)Intimate, sweet-toned and more easily given to dry humor than its powerful keyboard successors, the fortepiano should be a natural choice for Schubert lieder. Yet recordings such as this exquisitely personal recital — with the clear-voiced tenor Karim Sulayman and the sensitive pianist Yi-heng Yang — are still rare. Listen to them weave a storyteller’s spell in this song about a nighttime tryst in a fishing boat, and marvel at the emotional arc they weave with the simplest of gestures. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Des Fischers Liebesglück”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Ethel Smyth: ‘The Prisoner Awakes’“The Prison”; Experiential Orchestra and Chorus; James Blachly, conductor (Chandos)Ethel Smyth, suffragist and composer, is among several female composers receiving fresh, deserved attention as the classical music industry tackles its diversity problem. If they all receive recordings as perfect as this account of her last major work, we will all benefit. Half symphony, half oratorio, “The Prison” includes this striking chorale prelude, with dark and light in the same bars, at its heart. DAVID ALLEN“The Prisoner Awakes”Chandos◆ ◆ ◆Anna Thorvaldsdottir: ‘Mikros’“Epicycle II”; Gyda Valtysdottir (Sono Luminus)A subterranean hall of mirrors lures in the listener in this deeply affecting three-minute track. Gyda Valtysdottir’s cello takes on the guise of a modern-day Orpheus and the spectral sounds of the underworld as she layers her performance on top of two prerecorded tracks. As this protagonist cello line sighs, heaves and slackens, the taped parts add fragmented scratch tones, whispers and tremors, evoking terrain both alluring and treacherous. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Mikros”Sono Luminus◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Wölfl: Piano Sonata in E, Allegro“The Beethoven Connection”; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano (Chandos)No finer recording has emerged from the Beethoven celebration than this, and it has not a single work by Beethoven on it. Mr. Bavouzet’s inquisitive look at the musicians who were composing at the same time as their colleague and competitor features Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Jan Ladislav Dussek — but it’s the forgotten Joseph Wölfl, who once battled Beethoven in a duel of keyboard skills, who comes out best, in this immaculate, charming sonata. DAVID ALLENPiano Sonata in E, AllegroChandos◆ ◆ ◆[embedded content]AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More