Thorvaldsdottir, Anna

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    Two Premieres Reflect the Ups and Downs of Claire Chase’s ‘Density 2036’

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    Claire Chase’s “Density 2036,” an undertaking to commission a new flute repertoire, reached its 10th installment with a multi-concert retrospective.The flutist Claire Chase is a community builder. You can see this in “Density 2036,” her 24-year project to commission a new repertoire for her instrument. And you can sense a communal spirit when she offers gratitude to audiences who show up to several gigs in a row.This week, Chase voiced her appreciation to those who had attended multiple concerts in her recent 10th-anniversary “Density” retrospective at the Kitchen’s temporary location, in the Westbeth complex, and Zankel Hall.“It’s a lot of flute,” she acknowledged on Wednesday at the Kitchen. (Listeners beyond New York can experience something similar, with most of “Density” available to hear in recordings gathered on Chase’s Bandcamp profile.)True. But across two programs that night, Chase offered a generous spread of composers and their respective approaches to the flute family. As a result, the music never felt staid. You could enjoy the breathy qualities of pieces by Matana Roberts and Ann Cleare, as well as the harder-grooving material of works by Wang Lu and Craig Taborn.

    Density 2036: Part VIII (2021) by Claire ChaseEach installment of “Density” has a running time of about an hour. Some programs feature multiple pieces; some focus on just one. When the latter happens, there is an added sense of risk-taking, for listeners as well as for Chase. If a composition doesn’t hit strongly — well, that’s the whole hour.That was my experience on Thursday night, when Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ubique” premiered at Zankel. This work, like many in “Density” more than a mere flute solo, drew on the instrumental talents of Chase, the pianist Cory Smythe and the cellists Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods. (As was often the case during the retrospective, Levy Lorenzo steered the use of electronic sounds, and Nicholas Houfek provided subtle lighting design.)At Zankel Hall, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ubique” featured, from left, the cellist Katinka Kleijn, the pianist Cory Smythe, Chase and the cellist Seth Parker Woods.Jennifer TaylorIn the early going of “Ubique,” Thorvaldsdottir writes ear-catching passages: flurries of rhythmically dynamic piano-and-flute passages, and some winning two-cello drones. But as these elements were reprised in the second half, it sounded like the material was being stretched, without much new added to the bargain.At the other end of the spectrum, Chase’s willingness to give a composers an entire hour also paid dramatically satisfying dividends in the premiere of the improvising pianist and composer Craig Taborn’s “Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms” at the Kitchen. It was one of the best shows I’ve experienced this season.Taborn is storied in contemporary jazz, with pianism of delicacy, intricacy and power. His 2011 debut solo recording for ECM, “Avenging Angel,” is among the best piano works of this century, and in recent compositions for his Junk Magic ensemble, he has also been edging into chamber-like arrangements.So, Chase was wise to ask Taborn for a program-length “Density” piece. “Griefs” placed him in a quartet alongside Chase, the clarinetist Joshua Rubin and the percussionist Susie Ibarra. (Ibarra, also a key presence on jazz stages, has also recently performed the works of Pauline Oliveros with Chase.)“Griefs” begins with chiming synth figures on a digital loop, plus some thick, doleful acoustic piano harmonies; as is his regular practice, Taborn manipulated a small electronic manual that rested atop his piano. After Rubin entered on bass clarinet, Taborn’s articulation of the opening material accelerated, though the somber mood remained intact.It took five minutes for Chase to enter on a flute — but once she did, Taborn’s piece moved from its griefs to its charms. Across the hour, Chase was given space to partner with every other player in duos, all of which took advantage of Taborn’s invitations to improvise. With Rubin, she steered unison lines that gradually branched into rhythmically independent cries; the sneaky effect had the quality of Taborn’s own pianism. With Ibarra, she reveled in funk-laced passages. And with Taborn, she collaborated on long-lined melodies and freer sounding improvisations.Taborn himself took a few dramatic solos of his own, which were rambunctious and lyrical in equal measure. But he was also silent for significant stretches, listening closely to the other musical partnerships he’d set in motion. There was always something to savor.After the concert, I asked Taborn whether I’d missed out on any other similar chamber music of his. He mentioned some two-piano pieces that he has developed with Smythe — the pianist in the Thorvaldsdottir premiere — but said that “Griefs” was the first such piece of his at that scale. (And on June 24 at National Sawdust, Taborn will premiere the first part of a work in progress, for string quartet and his own piano.)

    Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe – X’s and Y’s | International Contemporary Ensemble from Digitice on Vimeo.When Chase gets around to recording and releasing this part of “Density,”, Taborn’s work deserves to be a big event in multiple music circles. For now, the premiere is emblematic of the kind of concert that Chase knows how to ask for, before any other classical music presenter. It’s the kind of piece that can only be commissioned by a soloist who is a close listener to the broad community of living American composers. And that’s a trait for which audiences are rightly grateful. More

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      Review: The Danish String Quartet Spins Through Schubert

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      The group returned to Zankel Hall for the latest installment of its “Doppelgänger” project, featuring a premiere by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.Schubert’s song “Gretchen am Spinnrade” famously imitates a spinning wheel in the piano: the left hand repeating the rhythm of a pedal, and the right whirling a phrase in perpetual motion. It’s not exact, but it is evocative, like the Goethe poetry it’s based on.At Zankel Hall on Thursday, that spirit of repetition — oblique and constantly transforming — coursed through the third installment of the Danish String Quartet’s “Doppelgänger” project, which pairs Schubert’s late quartets with new commissions, and closes with an arrangement of a lied: in this case, “Gretchen.”Before that came Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet, a relatively light work among its “Doppelgänger” siblings, and the single-movement “Quartettsatz,” as well as the world premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals,” a slippery but entrancing series of permutations in which a set of musical gestures are rearranged like matter.That piece rarely repeats itself, but the Schubert ones do; the violist Asbjorn Norgaard, speaking from the stage, described the “Rosamunde” as one of the most repetitive works in the quartet repertoire. (Philip Glass would like a word.) But it was less so on Thursday as the Danes ­— Norgaard, as well as the violinists Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, and the cellist Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin — skipped the written reprises of the first two movements’ opening sections.Those cuts make for a slightly shorter performance, perhaps not even easily noticed by a casual listener, but not a materially different experience. More striking was the playing itself, in both the “Rosamunde” and the “Quartettsatz”: unshowy, soft with an ember glow, charismatically dancing. Phrases were passed around with ease; rhythms and voices doubled seamlessly. At any given moment there was, as David Allen recently observed in The New York Times, the impression that each note had been considered. This was ensemble music at its purest — a consensus interpretation, rendered selflessly in service of the group as instrument.Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” wasn’t written as a direct response to Schubert, but in the context of Thursday’s program it came off as something of a distant cousin; her work is less interested in repeating whole passages, but like her Viennese predecessor she obsesses here over gestures, reshaping them, foregrounding and obscuring them, layering them in explorations of counterpoint and compatibility.Read into the title what you will: daily routines, ceremonies, religion. They all are implied in the piece’s nine sections — effectively made 11 by two “Ascension” interludes with the rich harmony of a chorale and the serene lyricism of a hymn. The segments flow into one another without pause, except for some written rests, and unfold organically, each little motif introduced then recurring in a new guise.At the start are sputtering bows and glissando slides over a droning foundation that is occasionally built out into briefly sustained, then shifting chords. Those textures — others come along, including percussive col legno and open fifths that flip steady ground into weightless suspension — glide among the instruments, a vocabulary ordered then reordered, always expressing a fresh thought. Thorvaldsdottir, in a mode characteristically abstract yet suggestive, could prolong an idea like this ad infinitum. But at 21 minutes, her score speaks with poetic concision, ending before it has overstated its point.About poetry: The Danes concluded their recital with a Schubertian arrangement of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” in which the first violin acted as the soprano. But they also introduced a fifth instrument, a music box. As Oland turned its handle, the machine spun out a roll of paper punched with the swirling piano line — seeming to repeat itself but, in its small changes, irresistibly moving.Danish String QuartetPerformed on Thursday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: A Guest Conductor Reveals the Philharmonic’s Potential

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      Santtu-Matias Rouvali, a contender for the orchestra’s podium, shined in “The Rite of Spring” — the piece Jaap van Zweden began his tenure there with.When Jaap van Zweden led his first concert as the New York Philharmonic’s music director, in September 2018, he ended the evening with Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Instead of an auspicious climax it was a red flag, a sign of many more performances like it to come: paradoxically rushed and ponderous; stridently martial; so obsessed with detail, there was little sense of a cohesive whole.An orchestra’s sound is not fixed, though. Music directors are often away — as van Zweden has been since November, with no plans to return until mid-March — which leaves room for guest conductors to reveal fresh potential in an ensemble you thought you knew well.As if to prove that point, the Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali — a contender for the Philharmonic podium when van Zweden departs next year, and the only guest to be given two weeks of concerts this season — ended Thursday’s program at David Geffen Hall with “The Rite of Spring.”If van Zweden’s reading of this work amounted to a warning, Rouvali’s was a glimpse of the insights and thrills he might bring to a tenure in New York. He, too, teased out details — a dancing ostinato in the basses near the end, prominent from the moment it started, took on a relentless terror — but didn’t sacrifice momentum or primal energy. Once Judith LeClair’s opening bassoon solo unfurled with liberal rubato, his “Rite” remained organic, in its wildness more unpredictably frightening than van Zweden’s brash yet controlled account.Rouvali’s performance was the kind that made you wish he would stick around a little longer, if only for the opportunity to hear what he has to say about other corners of the repertory. By that point, however, he had already covered so much ground, his visit to the Philharmonic was beginning to come off like a prolonged audition.Last week, he led Rossini’s “Semiramide” Overture (episodic where it should have steadily escalated); Magnus Lindberg’s new Piano Concerto No. 3 (lucid and well shepherded); and Beethoven’s Second Symphony (gracefully lithe and transparent). And Thursday’s program, in addition to the Stravinsky, opened with the New York premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s recent “Catamorphosis,” followed by Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, featuring Nemanja Radulovic in a staggering debut.Nemanja Radulovic made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.Chris LeeThorvaldsdottir’s work opened the evening, but with a 20-minute running time it was more substantial and satisfying than a typical curtain-raiser. Her music often has the feel of transcriptions from nature; like Messiaen notating bird songs, she seems to translate the sounds of tectonic and cosmic forces for the concert hall. Similarly immense, “Catamorphosis” at first appears like more of the same before developing into one of her most intensely felt scores to date.The environment she conjures here is one of entropy. Over a foundational pedal tone in the lower strings, textural fragments — brushed percussion, a piano played both inside the instrument and at the keyboard — come and go as if by chance. Occasionally, wisps of melody are emitted from the winds, too light to follow. In the violins, glissandos that slide the pitch slowly up and down are redolent of a distant siren.It’s fitting, in a sense, that “Catamorphosis” premiered without a live audience in the darker pandemic days of early 2021, streamed by the Berlin Philharmonic on its Digital Concert Hall. This is the music of natural forces indifferent to human witnesses; yet in those violins and their sense of looming urgency, a doleful cry for help — from Thorvaldsdottir, from the earth itself — begins to emerge.Percussive textures continue to pass through while the strings, rarely rising above a mezzo piano but made richer by divisi lines that add voices to each section, flare with the emotional tension and release of Barber’s Adagio for Strings — though, crucially, never for phrases long enough to tip into sentimentality. It is a requiem taking shape but held at bay.Radulovic was similarly withholding in the Prokofiev concerto. After lifting his bow above the strings of his instrument repeatedly, like a tennis player bouncing the ball before a serve, he softly let out into the work’s opening solo, resisting its invitation for a vibrato-heavy, singing line and opting instead for something lighter and more objective, befitting the transparency of the score.Modest at first, he was nevertheless an immediately commanding presence. Part of it was his pop star look, including platform boots and a mane of long, wavy hair with a topknot. But he was also charismatic in his adventurous rubato later in the Allegro moderato; in his simply lovely and smartly shaped melodies in the second movement; and in his folk freedom and crunchy chords in the Spanish-inflected finale. His encore — Paganini’s showy Caprice No. 24, made showier in an arrangement by Aleksandar Sedlar and Radulovic — was a dose of old-fashioned fun, with the kind of virtuosic, at times laugh-out-loud showmanship that has had audiences cheering for centuries.Throughout the concerto, Rouvali was a willing accomplice, lending the score the clarity it requires with a whiff of daring. It’s the kind of playing you might expect from the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, where he is the principal conductor. There, his close relationship with the ensemble has often resulted in lively performances that change from night to night in a spirit of experimentation and curiosity.Those aren’t qualities I usually associate with the New York Philharmonic. But I did on Thursday — and hopefully will more often in the future, whether Rouvali returns next as the orchestra’s music director or, at the very least, as a welcome guest.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      One Indelible Scene: the Master Class in Ambiguity in ‘Tár’

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      When Lydia Tár arrives at the Juilliard School to teach a master class in conducting, we know her about as well as the students do. Like them, we are aware — about 20 minutes into the film that bears her name — of her fame and exalted status. They, of course, live in a fictional world in which her celebrity is established, to the extent that their own professional aspirations are shaped by her example. But now they have a chance to encounter her in person. It doesn’t go well.The Juilliard episode is the fourth extended scene in “Tár.” Like the ones that come before, it presents Lydia, a prominent conductor and composer, in a more-or-less public setting. In due time, we’ll peer in on her private life and ponder its relevance to her work and reputation, but for now we know her as a poised paragon of artistic accomplishment. We’ve watched her converse onstage with the writer Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, flirt with a fan at a reception and spar over lunch with a colleague who is also an important philanthropic patron. In between these lingered-over moments are snippets of cellphone video with anonymous text commentary. The source and meaning of these words and images are unclear, but they produce a tremor of paranoia. We’re not the only ones watching Lydia.Later, a deceptively edited video of the master class will go viral, contributing to the collapse of Lydia’s career as her abusive and dishonest behavior comes to light. The scene itself, among those who have seen “Tár,” has achieved a similar notoriety. It’s become one of the most talked-about parts of the film. The main conflict — an argument between Lydia and an earnest, anxious student named Max, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.But like everything else in “Tár,” this episode of generational and ideological strife is more complicated than it might seem. And also simpler. Lydia, a one-time protégé of Leonard Bernstein, insists on the power of music to produce states of feeling and modes of experience that can’t easily be reduced to anything else. Todd Field, the director of “Tár,” has similar intuitions about film. He and Cate Blanchett, who as Lydia occupies nearly every frame of this 158-minute film, reverse the usual patterns of text and subtext. It’s not that there’s more to “Tár” than meets the eye and ear, with extra meanings hidden beneath the surface. Everything is right there on the screen and the soundtrack, arranged to confound and complicate your expectations.Lydia’s too. She strolls onto the classroom stage as eight young musicians, conducted by Max, are laying down what Lydia will call the “bed of strings” of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Ro.” Commanding the students’ attention effortlessly, Lydia is comfortable in her own charisma, confident in her opinions and intellect — to the point of hubris, but we don’t know that yet.The first thing she does is establish her dominance, preparing for Max’s thorough humiliation. He’s nervous, smiling, eager to oblige as she asks him why he chose Juilliard and then suggests that it might have been for the “brand.” Her tone is jocular, but her aggression is unmistakable. She ridicules his choice of music — we’ll come back to that — and pleads with him to consider exploring older, more canonical figures. Like Johann Sebastian Bach, for example.That name turns out to be a provocation. Max, who defines himself as a “BIPOC, pangender person,” says that Bach’s reputation for misogyny and his cisgender white male identity make it hard for him to appreciate the composer’s music. At this moment, the script edges toward an easy satire of the young. There are Gen Xers and baby boomers who have encountered — or at least heard stories about — members of succeeding generations who refuse to read the novels of Edith Wharton, see the films of Woody Allen or worship at the altar of Pablo Picasso. Their critique of the canon is often caricatured and misunderstood, and Max may embody the shibboleths of his elders as much as he does the attitude of his peers. His objection to Bach, in any case, serves as bait for the audience and for Lydia.She seizes on it as a teaching moment, and her response is itself a mini-course in the dos and don’ts of contemporary pedagogy. At times, she is bullying and sarcastic, haranguing the class about the fallacies of identity and failing or refusing to read the sensitivities in the room. But she also tries, in good faith, to reach the students where they are. Rather than revert to an argument from authority, browbeating Max with the eternal fact of Bach’s greatness, she invites him to sit next to her at the piano while she demonstrates the complexity and power of his music. In Bach, she says, the question — illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice — is always more interesting than the answer.This is true of art in general. The puzzles, paradoxes and mysteries are what keep it alive. A lot of cultural criticism — by which I mean not only the considered responses of professionals but the immediate reactions of viewers — tacks in the opposite direction. We are eager to find an answer, assign a meaning, take a side. This scene seems to be urging us to do just that, to share Lydia’s irritation with Max, so shallow in his certainty and so ill-equipped to defend his position.We might also, in the moment and especially when we look back on it, squirm at Lydia’s self-satisfaction. She treats the master class as an occasion to perform her own brilliance, a temptation that can be fatal to the actual work of teaching, which finally rests on the canceling of ego. The vanity Lydia displays here, which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing, and we may feel a premonition of that as we watch her pacing and preening, unaware of the puzzlement and indifference in the eyes of her spectators.Really, though, the scene — like the movie — is much weirder than that. It may seem that Field and Blanchett are collaborating in a topical tale of crime and punishment, which the debate about the relevance of Bach’s behavior to his canonical status recapitulates in miniature. Later, we will find Lydia arguing the other side of the question. At lunch in a Berlin restaurant, she reminds a retired maestro that the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Her much older male colleague wonders what that has to do with Schopenhauer’s thought. The argument, as at Juilliard, reaches an impasse.As will any similar argument about Lydia herself, who is a formidably talented artist and also a narcissistic, amoral monster. But neither her greatness nor her awfulness is what is most interesting about her. Shortly after “Tár” opened, The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article by Brooke LaMantia, who claimed to have watched the movie under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person. Anthony Lane began his review in The New Yorker with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be. More recently, Dan Kois wrote an essay in Slate suggesting that the last part of the film — the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing — takes place in her head, which is to say in a reality distinct from the literal, social world in which the rest of the movie is set.I don’t really buy that, any more than I believe that anyone really thought there was a real Lydia Tár, but Kois, Lane and LaMantia get at the essential uncanniness of “Tár,” which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.And that brings us back to the unseen person whose presence is felt in that tense session: Anna Thorvaldsdottir, an actual living Icelandic composer who may have acquired new fame as Lydia Tár’s nemesis. The trashing of Thorvaldsdottir occupies much of the scene. Lydia sneers at her “au courant” trendiness, her “hot” good looks, a score notation that “sounds like René Redzepi’s recipe for reindeer.” A conductor performing her music is like a salesman “selling a car without an engine.” At one point Max meekly notes that Thorvaldsdottir conducted an earlier master class in the same course, and it seems possible that poor Max is an innocent victim in a high-powered music-world beef.Maybe it’s also the case that Lydia is a proxy in a similar war. Maybe Field can’t stand Anna Thorvaldsdottir, or maybe Hildur Gudnadottir, the Icelandic composer who scored “Tar,” feels that way. Iceland is a small country; contemporary classical music is a small world.I won’t speculate further, except to note that Thorvaldsdottir might function as what devotees of a different kind of movie like to call an Easter egg. Adam Gopnik is another, as are Leonard Bernstein and the Juilliard School itself. They appear as tokens, clues, nudges at the viewer who might not be paying the right kind of attention. They all belong to the world outside “Tár” — our world — and their presence inside the movie is more than merely allusive.Lydia Tár exists as if on a folded-over page in that world, where the correct answer to the perennially misunderstood question about the distinction between art and life is written in invisible ink. She’s as real as it gets. 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