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    In ‘Lash,’ Rebecca Saunders’s First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death

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    Rebecca Saunders has collaborated with the artist Ed Atkins to create “Lash,” a work that hovers around themes of illness and intimacy.Toward the end of “Lash,” a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to “come to bed and die.”Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum.The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his “Old Food,” which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins’s prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death.On Friday, “Lash” will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders’s first opera and Atkins’s first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love,” in 2021, “Lash” is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning.That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. “I didn’t want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,” Saunders said. “I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.”“Lash” features four female performers — the singers Noa Frenkel, Sarah Maria Sun and Anna Prohaska, and the actor Katja Kolm — who represent separate strands of a single consciousness.Marcus LieberenzWe 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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      Pianist Nicolas Hodges Adapts to Life With Parkinson’s

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      Nicolas Hodges has carried on with his career as an eminent interpreter of avant-garde music. But it hasn’t been without sacrifices.In the fall of 2018, the pianist Nicolas Hodges noticed his body shaking. He brought it up at a routine doctor’s appointment in Tübingen, Germany, where he lives. The doctor said it was probably stress, but recommended that he make an appointment with a neurologist.Hodges didn’t make that appointment right away. But then, in January 2019, the shaking caused him to play a wrong note during a performance.“It became instantly clear that I had to find out what was going on,” he said.Dr. Klaus Schreiber, a neurologist and a classical music lover, observed Hodges performing a few minor physical tasks — walking across a room, undressing and dressing — before he sent him for a series of tests that confirmed Hodges had Parkinson’s disease.Dr. Schreiber estimated that Hodges had been performing with Parkinson’s for three years.Hodges, 53, is a leading interpreter of contemporary classical music. As a soloist and chamber musician, he has premiered and recorded works by many important composers of this century, and the last. Recently, his symptoms have forced him to reduce and prioritize his performing commitments.The worst symptoms, which rarely occur, can leave him feeling, he said, as if he “just couldn’t play the piano.” But the diagnosis has also strengthened his dedication to his artistry and the contemporary repertoire.Physical limits have forced Hodges to make “aesthetic decisions,” he said, to select what music to commission and to perform with greater rigor. The diagnosis has “made me try to focus even more on what multiple contradictory things are most important to me.”Hodges has formidable technique and an ability to make the form of even highly complex pieces clearly audible. His tone color on the piano can shift from vinegary to supple in seconds. He is strikingly adaptable to the widely divergent visions of various contemporary composers. In John Adams’s “China Gates” (1977), Hodges has combined rhythmic propulsion with tiptoe delicacy. In Brian Ferneyhough’s opera “Shadowtime” (2004), he tackled a prismatically virtuosic solo while asking enigmatic questions out loud, like “What is the cube root of a counterfactual?” In Simon Steen-Andersen’s Piano Concerto (2014), he faced off against a video projection of himself at a smashed grand piano.Hodges, front, in Brian Ferneyhough’s “Shadowtime” at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005.©Stephanie BergerIn 2020, Hodges recorded “A Bag of Bagatelles,” which wove together works by Beethoven and Harrison Birtwistle, a close collaborator. The juxtaposition illuminates the complexity, unpredictability and orchestral scale that animate the music of two composers centuries apart. Looking back, Hodges realized that he had recorded the album with untreated Parkinson’s disease.HODGES WAS BORN in London in 1970. His father was a studio manager at the BBC who later worked in computing, and his mother was a professional opera singer. Hodges began playing the piano at age 6 and composing at 9. Among his early pieces was the first scene of an opera based on the Perseus myth.Hodges attended elementary school at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, where he took lessons on the viola, the oboe, the harpsichord and the organ, in addition to the piano. He sang in the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, performing works like Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Festival Hall under Simon Rattle.“We were woken up earlier than the rest of the school to practice,” Hodges said. The students who didn’t play music “got half an hour more sleep than I did the whole of my childhood.”For secondary school, Hodges went to Winchester College, in Hampshire, where Benjamin Morison, a pianist and composer who is now a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, introduced Hodges to contemporary music by playing an LP of music by Birtwistle and Gyorgy Kurtag. Hodges and Morison performed an arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for two pianos and Pierre Boulez’s restless “Structures II” for their teachers and fellow students at Winchester, to bemused reactions.“I remember him being very precise — and encouraging me to be precise — and extremely musical,” Morison said of Hodges in a phone interview. “He was able to make the music speak as music.”In 1986, Hodges took a seminar with the composer Morton Feldman at the Dartington Summer School, where Feldman impressed upon him the seriousness of the experimental avant-garde. Hodges also played in a band that covered songs by the Sex Pistols and the Sisters of Mercy.Hodges has made a career as an avant-garde specialist, eventually working with the composers he idolized during his musical upbringing.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesIt was a heady and influential time. “I was improvising; I was listening to weird, dark, funky music, and playing Debussy,” Hodges said.For several years, he considered pursuing composition, to the dismay of his more traditionally minded mother. At age 23, he decided to refocus on the piano. “I just was having more fun as a pianist,” he said. “Composing is too much hard work.”As part of that decision, Hodges began studying with the pianist Sulamita Aronovsky, who had defected to Britain from the Soviet Union. A car crash shortly after the move had ended her career as a performer. “She used to say to me, whenever I would come to her lesson and complain, ‘Mr. Hodges, you have to accept everyone has these problems,’” he recalled. “‘It’s the people who get past these problems who have careers.’”Hodges has since performed as a soloist with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — usually in contemporary repertoire and often with pieces written for him. He is a professor of piano at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and almost constantly premieres new work solo and in chamber music formations.“All these composers that we had idolized when we were teenagers, he has subsequently commissioned pieces from,” said Morison, who remains close with Hodges. “It’s an extraordinary thrill to witness that.”WHEN HODGES RECEIVED his diagnosis, the news came with conflicting emotions. The first, Hodges recalled, was a certain cockiness. “I’m going to be a medical miracle,” he thought to himself. “I’m going to carry on whatever happens.”When that phase passed, Hodges felt relief. He had a clear diagnosis, and the dopamine treatments prescribed by Dr. Schreiber helped. “The medication makes it possible for me to sometimes feel and play like I don’t have it,” Hodges said. “When you’re suffering from something like that and you’re untreated, you feel like you’re getting old before your time, you feel like your children have worn you out — and my poor children were blamed for that.”Hodges has had to make painful decisions while prioritizing performing commitments. Since 2012, he has played in Trio Accanto, an ensemble consisting of Hodges, the German percussionist Christian Dierstein and the Swiss saxophonist Marcus Weiss. The group has toured Europe’s major new-music festivals and recorded six albums of contemporary music together.Hodges performed Rebecca Saunders’s “to an utterance” earlier this year, and plans to play a new solo work she is writing for him.Roderick Aichinger for The New York TimesWhen Dierstein and Weiss learned of Hodges’s diagnosis, they were shaken. “We’re scared, and we are as concerned and sad as we were when we first found out,” Dierstein said in a video interview. “But it was always clear to us that we want to continue playing with Nic and that we’ll take the illness into account.”After a period of reflection during the coronavirus pandemic, Hodges decided to withdraw from Trio Accanto. He found the logistics involved in traveling to concerts and dealing with the complex instrumental setups required by many pieces too taxing. The 2024-25 season will be Hodges’s last with the group.Playing with Trio Accanto “was ideal chamber music for me,” Hodges said. But, he added, “Parkinson’s makes it necessary for my life to be simple.”Hodges has also learned to structure the doses of his medication — including a dopamine inhaler, a receptor agonist patch and extended-release pills — in a way that supports his concert roster. This often requires stark sacrifices: He essentially schedules the worst of his symptoms.In February, Hodges performed Rebecca Saunders’s “to an utterance” for piano and orchestra, a work composed for him, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. A final rehearsal the afternoon of the performance meant he had to take dopamine once at 4 p.m., and again at 8 p.m.“There might be moments when I feel like I’ve taken a bit too much,” Hodges said earlier that day, “but in the situation of playing, that’s way better than having taken too little.”In an email, Saunders said that Hodges still plays with intensity. “His recent performance of the piano concerto ‘to an utterance’ was brilliant, and I found it deeply expressive,” she wrote. She is planning to write him an ambitious new piece she described as “a big, long solo based on the concerto.”Seven other composers are currently at work on new piano concertos for Hodges. This spring, he recorded Betsy Jolas’s complete solo piano works and premiered a new piece by Christian Wolff, “Scraping Up Sand in the Bottom of the Sea.” Hodges also plans to record an album with works by Debussy and contemporary composers, similar to his double portrait of Beethoven and Birtwistle.On rare occasions, Hodges has felt he was treated differently because of his illness. One composer recently “looked straight at my hands as if they would be twisted or bleeding,” he said. But many more of his collaborators have been supportive, helping him adapt without condescension or pity.Hodges says that his goal, now, is to adjust his career “to ensure that I have the best chance to slow the progress of the disease and thus keep playing with any qualities I might have had before Parkinson’s more or less intact.”He knows that might not last forever. “If I should stop playing, then I hope that my friends tell me I should stop playing,” Hodges said. “But, at the moment, it’s working.” More

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      The Thrill of a Contemporary Classical Concert, Captured on Disc

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookThe Thrill of a Contemporary Classical Concert, Captured on DiscWith live performances still largely shut down, the group Klangforum Wien has released a five-album set of solos and premieres.Members of Klangforum Wien at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2019.Credit…Tina HerzlFeb. 17, 2021, 12:33 p.m. ETIt’s easy to focus on large institutions when bemoaning the loss of classical music in New York during the pandemic; their concerts were big-ticket items, planned (and planned for) far in advance. Yet the charm of cultural life in this city has often been found in evenings that came together on a shorter timeline, and at smaller venues.I remembered this while listening to five new albums recently released on the Kairos label — all featuring members of Klangforum Wien, an Austrian chamber orchestra with a strong reputation in contemporary classical music.They’re the kind of group you could find, before the pandemic, playing a free concert in the small recital hall at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Midtown. You might R.S.V.P. a couple of hours before the performance, where sterling renditions of rarely heard repertoire would lend a vivid, unexpected charge to the evening. Existing somewhere between the informality of the pop-up concert and the pomp of the major symphonic or operatic showcase, these are sorely missed, too.In some ways, though, a similar experience is possible with these new recordings, which are centered on individual composers — Olga Neuwirth, Toshio Hosokawa, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino and Georges Aperghis — and their works for soloists. The albums, recorded last summer and each featuring a premiere commissioned by the ensemble, feel like experimental-business-as-usual, executed at a typically high level; the players sequence vistas of extremity and alarm next to furtive glimpses of more traditional instrumental beauty. Few listeners will thrill to every single piece. But that’s normal, even useful. (Remember risk-taking? The cultural kind, not the taking-your-life-in-your-hands-to-buy-groceries kind?)A chancy overall approach helps the programming of the five albums resonate. Each comes with the subtitle “Solo,” Klangforum’s only reminder of the limitations put on pandemic recording practices. Otherwise, they all offer a welcome release from recent productions that promise good-enough amiability for the moment. Even if you’re unfamiliar with these composers, you can get started with the tracks below.Olga Neuwirth: ‘Magic Flu-idity’It’s a little bit of a cheat to call “Magic Flu-idity” a solo. This work for flute — heard in New York, when Claire Chase played it as part of her “Density 2036” project in 2019 — requires a percussionist to join in, on an Olivetti typewriter. (On Klangforum’s release, that percussionist is Lukas Schiske, joining the flutist Vera Fischer).Still, Neuwirth earns the extra instrumental voice. The typewriter’s punchy carriage return — and its associated pinging sound — has a way of punctuating the end of barreling motifs in the flute writing. There’s a wit in these moments that leavens some of the aggression found elsewhere. It’s a balance Neuwirth has also struck in her “Lost Highway Suite.”If you find yourself won over by “Magic Flu-idity,” make time for the first track on the album: “CoronAtion I: io son ferito ahimè” (2020), a work for percussion and sampled audio commissioned by the group.Toshio Hosokawa: ‘Falling Cherry Blossoms’Hosokawa emphasizes his interest in Western experimentalism, traditional Japanese musical forms, as well as in calligraphy — which he has used as a metaphor for his own compositional approach. The first of his “2 Japanese Folk Songs” for harp, written in 2003, contains peculiar timbres and percussive fillips. But it also features a transporting melodic gracefulness, particularly in Virginie Tarrête’s recording.His diverse reference points are also identifiable in other works on the album. A piano solo, “‘Haiku’ for Pierre Boulez” contains the sort of heady modernism that its dedicatee specialized in; yet it also has a Zen-inflected calm — what the ensemble’s liner notes describe as “an almost ego-less ‘Path of Awareness’” — that is rare in Boulez’s body of work.Rebecca Saunders: ‘Dust’A mysterious play with texture and spare melodic materials form the core of Saunders’s aesthetic; just listen to the recent release of her orchestral works in the Musica Viva series (one of my favorite albums of 2020). Klangforum’s tour of her writing for solo instruments is not as consistently thrilling. Though played well by the pianist Florian Müller, Saunders’s “Shadow,” from 2013, seems less distinctive than the composer’s best pieces — its rapid changes in dynamics familiar from vintage experimental trends.But other entries in this solo set deliver. One is “Dust,” a percussion piece performed here by Björn Wilker. Saunders’s imagination is well represented within the work’s wealth of sonic effects. The movement between uneasy, wobbling tones and steadier, more mournful harmonies for pitched percussion elements is both persuasive and ravishing. And the album’s closing work — another piano solo, commissioned by Klangforum and performed by Joonas Ahonen — shows a composer fully in command of her voice. (That solo, titled “to an utterance — study,” may whet appetites for her larger piano concerto of the same name, set to premiere later this year.)Salvatore Sciarrino: ‘Due notturni: I’Sciarrino is perhaps the best-known composer represented in this Klangforum set, but the album devoted to his solos still contains surprises. The leadoff pair of nocturnes, composed in 1998, have a relaxed air, particularly when compared with the more harried “Notturni crudeli” piano solos. Another highlight is “Canzona di ringraziamento,” a quivering and arresting “mutation” for alto saxophone.Georges Aperghis: ‘Lopsided Sob’Save the most dramatic, intense album in the “Solo” series for the end. Aperghis’s experimental sound world is famously theatrical; and “Lopsided Sob,” a 2015 piece for accordion, shows that he was losing none of his febrile flair as he approached age 70.There’s a gamboling quality in the dense first figures. The drama increases, paradoxically, as the music transitions into quieter dynamics. Will the opening aggression return? While you wait to find out, the coexistence of Aperghis’s dissonant harmonies and the effervescence embedded in Krassimir Sterev’s performance produces a pleasingly dizzying effect.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story 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