Bach was generous with musical invention, but reticent with information about how to perform his scores. Accustomed to directing the players he worked with, he didn’t specify how soft or loud any given passage should be, how sharp the accents, or how colorful the sound. The players knew these things, and if they didn’t he would tell them. Only now, they don’t.

The lack of detail is part of the Mass’s magnetism, because it allows performers to project onto it whatever they imagine it contains. That’s one reason there are so many recordings, ranging from syrupy orchestrations (with whipped cream on top) to the first original-instruments performances so thin and jerky they sound like a wheezing squeezebox. Search carefully through the bin, and you emerge with a map of changing tastes inscribed in Bach’s tough and pliant music.

The B minor Mass crept gradually into the repertoire over the course of the 19th century, so that by the turn of the 20th, orchestras had inherited it bundled with a repertoire of vast romantic symphonies. That’s the way things remained for decades. Orchestras that had expanded to cover the huge sonic expanses of Mahler and Bruckner symphonies lavished resources on composers who could never have imagined gathering such immense musical armies. In a 1959 recording with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Hermann Scherchen opens the Kyrie Eleison with a vast, sunlit chord that seems to burst from an ocean of silence, a chord sung by a great gathering of souls. The numbers matter, and not just because a bigger ensemble produces a thicker sound, but also because it amplifies the distance between the loudest loud and the most reverent soft, between the group shout and the solo plea. Scherchen uses that acoustic fact to produce operatic extremes of intensity. The “Crucifixus” is terribly poignant music almost no matter how you play it, and in Scherchen’s sublimely mournful version, you can practically see the lights dim, and a procession of burlap-clad mourners tread slowly across the stage. The “Et resurrexit” follows in a flash of brass and drums, Christ’s resurrection heralded by outbursts of collective ecstasy.

The goes-to-11 treatment could easily turn into caricature, which is where Herbert Von Karajan took it in 1974, with the Berlin Philharmonic. His “Kyrie” is so intent on achieving instant glory, it’s practically hysterical. His “Crucifixus” is a juggernaut’s tread. The authentic performance practice movement was born partly in reaction to such excesses. Soon Karajan and his cohort were defending against a small but dedicated band of scholar-musicians who thought they knew exactly what instructions the composer gave and to whom. Joshua Rifkin declared symphonic Bach an abomination and insisted on one singer per part in lieu of massed choirs. In 1982 Rifkin produced a version that, in accordance with the new orthodoxy, was slender to the point of scratchiness. Still, he made his point: that the B Minor Mass is a work of vocal music and so the singers are the stars. He recruited agile, light-voiced singers like Julianne Baird, who skips through the “Laudamus Te” with an ingénue’s charm. Rifkin had launched a paradox: What is the authentic way to execute a work that had no place in Bach’s time? If the most historically accurate way to interpret the piece would be not to do it at all, then the only question is not how he did perform it but how he might have.

The next 20 years brought a flood of versions that were both scrupulous and musical, faithful to the evidence that Bach counted his musicians by the handful and not by the hundred, but also to the cosmic drama of the score. I have kept Philippe Herreweghe’s supple recording in rotation for many years, sometimes supplanted by John Eliot Gardiner’s more caffeinated version. Lately, though, I’ve been entranced by another finely tooled recording featuring the Bach Collegium Japan, conducted by Maasaki Suzuki. Instead of stunning revelations and volcanic upwellings of the spirit, Suzuki offers the Mass as an intimate, contemplative experience.

The wheel may be turning once again. The New York Philharmonic recently reclaimed the B Minor Mass from the early music specialists, performing it as part of the orchestra’s Bach Variations festival. That concert was recorded for future release, perhaps opening the door for a new generation of orchestral versions that are once large and light, baroque in spirit and modern in execution.

That program gave me a frame in which to place the avant-garde weirdness of the ’60s and ’70s: It had all begun 150 years earlier with Beethoven, that rude churl of Hapsburg Vienna, whose urgent dissonances and angry rhythms could still rattle the establishment. The fact that the apparatus of concert music — the purpose-built halls, the genius-worship, the cult of quiet listeners — was created to honor his music made Beethoven’s ferocity all the more vital. Long after he had died and been deified, he was still throwing the moneylenders out of the temple.

It took me a while to understand that the composers who dominated musical life when I was growing up spent a lot of time trying to wriggle free of Beethoven. Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, Jacob Druckman — these erudite revolutionaries wanted nothing to do with the massed melodic panting of an orchestra, or the triumph of a heroic theme. Theirs was music of fragmentation, of society’s doubts laid bare and left unreconciled. Composers have always been torn between convention and radicalism, but this generation felt the tension more desperately than most. The symphony orchestra was an especially fearsome bugaboo. The Vietnam War and the student strikes that spread all over Europe in 1968 had made it perfectly clear: Institutions were suspect and ranks of identically dressed men moving in lockstep constituted a form of oppression, even if they wielded violin bows rather than riot clubs.

It wasn’t just the orchestra that seemed antique; so did the old tools and genres. How could you write for violin in the nuclear age, or blow an oboe after the Holocaust? How could anyone just pen a tune? This kind of thinking could have led to a period of musical nihilism, a highbrow form of punk. Instead, composers dismantled the very tradition that had produced them, then got to work on the fascinating pile of springs and bits of wire. Rather than abandoning the previous century’s instruments, Luciano Berio methodically picked apart their techniques in a multi-year series of solos he called Sequenze. By the time he was done with an oboe, it sounded like a completely different creature. In the third “Sequenza,” he reassembled human song into a psychotic soliloquy of toneless consonants, phonemes, squeaks, giggles, pitches and assorted other forms of expression.

In the ’60s and ’70s, composers found themselves mirroring the period’s violent extremes. They exploded traditional genres, reinvented rules from scratch, rejected the orchestra or amped it up with electronics. Many were entranced by the challenge of wringing maximum complexity out of minimal means. Stockhausen was fired by the trancelike experiences he’d had in Mexico. “I’d spent a month walking through the ruins, visiting Oaxaca, Merida, and Chichenitza, and becoming a Maya, a Toltec, a Zatopec, an Aztec or a Spaniard — I became the people,” he recalled. He recreated that exaltation in Stimmung, for six amplified singers who pass around the five notes of a B flat ninth chord for more than an hour, producing an effect like shimmering heat.

But the orchestra wasn’t dead yet. In his 1961 Atmosphères, György Ligeti had a symphonic ensemble pour out a churning bath of sound, a sound so infinite, weightless and dark that Stanley Kubrick used it to give his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey its apocalyptic mood. Ligeti had scraped away virtually all the traditional ingredients of music — just try to find a pulse, a key, or a tune in that! — and was left with a great sonic mural. That search for tone-pictures, for great glowing landscapes of sonority, replaced habitual kinds of beauty. This naturally unsettled audiences.

The traditional concerto, too, refused to be killed off, partly because the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich strong-armed every composer he admired into writing him one. Henri Dutilleux complied with Tout un monde lointain.The title (meaning “a whole distant world”) refers to a poem by Charles Baudelaire, in which a woman’s “black ocean” of hair evokes a geyser of exotic fantasies. The score, too, moves from languor to heat. It’s a Technicolor work, amplifying the subtle orchestral hues that Dutilleux learned from Ravel and Debusssy into an ever-changing polychrome vista.

Rostropovich also tapped Witold Lutoslawski, who took the opportunity to rewrite the roles that a soloist and orchestra play. His concerto (from 1970) opens with a single note on the cello, repeated slowly, an irritating number of times. Think of it: All those people sitting there on stage, representing a long tradition of complexity and drama, and what does the virtuoso do? Play a beginner’s exercise. The ordinariness doesn’t last, of course. The cello begins to argue with itself, sigh, mutter, and return to its fixed idea, while the orchestra stands by, as if the planet had stopped spinning, waiting for the conclusion of a single meandering thought. The world finally arrives in the form of a single trumpet blast, and then it’s the orchestra that goes giddily berserk while the cello keeps plodding along on the same damn note. What follows is a series of bleakly colorful episodes, crafted bursts of insanity: the cello emoting soulfully while percussionists tap madly in another part of the stage; angry fusillades of brass, the black-on-midnight-blue nocturne of a low cello against a growl of strings. Like Beethoven before him, Lutoslawski understood that the old established order didn’t need to be destroyed for a revolution to occur.

Have you ever felt the kind of sensual anger that sometimes invades your limbs and fills you with the curdled milk of human self-righteousness? That’s the kind of joyous rage that DiDonato funnels into the aria “Crude furie” (from Handel’s Serse), which summons “ruthless furies from the barbarous abyss.” The album of Handel arias is called Furore, and in it she delights in the physical pleasure of indignation, using it to power not just the high scorcher of a note on “seno” (“breast”), but a whole range of quivering subtleties.

DiDonato has said that the world needs opera — and opera needs Handel — precisely because of those outsized ladies who strut and screech and dominate and implore, multiplying ordinary human emotions to Imax scale and dispensing with petty fretting and miniature woes. These are characters who suffer exquisitely. Real pain is not beautiful or fun to witness, but opera can transfigure it into a spectacularly entertaining conflagration. For that to happen, the singer has to perform two contradictory tricks: abandon herself utterly to the cascade of dangerous emotions, and maintain total control. DiDonato is one of very few singers who can keep those opposites in unwavering equilibrium.

Unthinking musicians often make baroque arias sound lugubrious and repetitive, because on paper they are. But 18th-century composers trusted interpreters to understand that on the stage as in real life, saying something again means saying it more intensely. If the page reads “Are you? Are you? Are you?” the singer must make it: “Are you? Are you? ARE YOU?” — and not just by getting louder. For a sense of how a great singer regulates the flow of energy, listen to the opening of “Addio, Roma,” from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea: a quick, pale dab of voice brushed across an “Ah.” As DiDonato’s timbre comes into focus, so does the character’s crushing despair. It takes no more than a syllable to open a fragile soul.

DiDonato returns to that opera in her most recent — and most spectacular — recording, Drama Queens. She begins the empress Octavia’s aria “Disprezzata regina” (“Scorned Sovereign”) with an intimate moan and gradually ramps up the indignation into a full-throated feminist cry: “Se la natura e ‘l ciel libere ci produce/ Il matrimonio ci incatena serve” (“If nature and the heavens make us women free/ Marriage chains us in slavery.”

If DiDonato confined herself to the baroque era, or if she were merely a connoisseur of misery, that would have been enough for a fine career. But she strides into other centuries, and other styles, with enormous charm, and that makes her a star. In her collection of Rossini arias, she floats from silken scales to gossamer trills, rising to each high note on a helium cloud, before shivering back down. She’s also professional without being pretentious. You can hear her sense of humor and natural lack of fakery in the “Villanelle” that opens Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été. As that work’s summer nights more languorous and more heavily scented in “Le spectre de la rose,” DiDonato unfurls yet another aspect of her musicality, a wistful tenderness carried on the warm breeze of her voice.

Charm and melancholy merge in her recital album Diva, Divo, in which she hops back and forth between male and female roles. In “Nacqui all’affanno,” the final aria of Rossini’s Cenerentola, the ever-ebullient Cinderella recalls her life of drudgery and chortles over her good fortune at having found her prince. After some draping some filigree around the stage, she stands back for a moment and lets the orchestra gallop for a while before lighting the fireworks of “Non più mesta.” When she arrives at that moment, bleakness is banished and joy takes over for as long as Joyce DiDonato keeps flinging luminous notes into the air.

It’s not that his style is antiquarian — a lively inventiveness bubbles up in every measure. Rather, he has figured out contemporary ways to describe memory in music. “Light Upon the Hill,” from the musical February House, has a fluid, conversational rhythm, like a well-rehearsed anecdote told against the cozy tinkle of a banjo: “Here’s to the driver who took me downtown when I got to New York/ I was glad for the ride/ How the buildings we passed were all gleaming/ I was dreaming a life I’d look out from the inside.”

The refrain (“In Brooklyn, there is light upon the hill/ It glows despite the storm”) sneaks out of the stream of words and notes, a moment of stillness interrupting the run-on verse and thickening instrumentation. The song evolves quickly, giving the music a narrative quality — this is theater, after all. But the words offer no story, just a succession of images from a fondly remembered life. The melody emulates the act of leafing through those snapshots by circling back on itself with Sondheim-like obsessiveness. The tempo trots along, with nowhere to go but the past, and the past is not a destination.

February House, which had its premiere at the Public Theater in New York, in May, 2012, recreates the sort of “scene” Kahane insists he wants no part of. The building of the title is a run-down Brooklyn Heights brownstone where in the early 1940s the editor George Davis played den mother for a highbrow commune that included W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. It was the perfect moment for Kahane’s sensibility: a gathering of talented, versatile, 30-ish, well-connected people living under the same Brooklyn roof. To Kahane, it is the aesthetic idyll that couldn’t last. The best and most elegiac number is “Goodnight to the Boarding House,” a mournful ode to the fragility of happiness, delivered in an upper register somewhere between a falsetto and a sob.

I was first drawn to Kahane’s lyric gift, and his sincere, slightly sandpapery voice, by Craigslistlieder, a cycle of songs set to personal ads scavenged online. “Neurotic and lonely, average height, brown eyes slightly disproportionate, Jewfro,” begins one, and the advertiser’s self-consciousness is reflected in the jumpy, slightly obsessive melodic line and anxious piano counterpoint. Craigslistlieder is a startling piece — smart, beautifully made, and darkly funny.

Since then, Kahane has sped off in a number of different musical directions, not so much eliding genres as hopping from one to the other. He has collaborated with the bluegrass icon Chris Thile and the jazzman Brad Mehldau, he has written an intense but somewhat inchoate piano sonata for Natasha Paremski, and he is now writing a cello sonata for Alisa Weilerstein. Carnegie Hall recently commissioned what it hoped would be a large-scale work for voice and string quartet. It turned out to be a suite of miniatures.

Kahane keeps returning to the song form, where he has staked out territory as a hyperliterate bard of hipster wistfulness. The Carnegie Hall piece is called The Fiction Issue, a reference to The New Yorker‘s annual short story collection, and the score’s sensibility is not far from the magazine’s. Subtlety, complexity and wry humor are spiced with timely references and flecks of musical slang. Kahane draws a distinction between his pop songs and his “classical” works, but they often come tumbling indistinguishably out of the same fingers, and the same sensitive throat. His album, Where are the Arms is by a pop balladeer who can sing Schubert’s Winterreise as a party trick. In the album’s first song, “Charming Disease,” the cryptic phrase is fragmented into a Gertrude Stein incantation (What a charming what a charming charming little disease”). It hopscotches around the beats, momentarily blurring the sense of meter. The next track, “Merritt Parkway” opens with a pensive chain of piano chords that could have fallen out of Schumann’s wastepaper basket, but Kahane disguises their romanticism slightly with a string tremolo that shimmers dissonantly and the quasi-chanted words: “I was on the side of the road, / Shiny traffic beetling by” — and what a touch worthy of Lingua Franca, that word, “beetling.” Kahane no doubt has a future as a major musical figure in coming decades, and maybe also as a dramatic character: the slightly depressive elf in some future sequel to February House.

The courts and cathedrals of early Renaissance Europe organized music into three categories that ranged in prestige. All the forms demanded immense sophistication, not just to compose, but to sing and appreciate, too. The lowest of these three high levels was the secular chanson, often an exquisitely crafted love song based on an existing popular tune, with a text in French (rather than Latin). Though Ockeghem’s “Ma bouche rit” (“My mouth laughs, but my thoughts weep”) is often performed by one singer with accompanying instruments, the three lines intertwine, and points of imitation, in which one voice echoes another, glint in the contrapuntal flow. Ockeghem was a master at making complexity sound sprightly and straightforward, a balance that the Orlando Consort strikes, too, in an all-vocal recording that includes a batch of spectacularly intricate chansons. In the sprightly “S’elle m’amera,” Ockeghem stirs together borrowed and original melodies, a little like a hip-hop artist paying tribute to another by sampling a recognizable riff.

One step up the ladder of musical prestige comes the motet. Only a handful of these devotional pieces with Latin texts are reliably attributable to Ockeghem, but what a phenomenal half hour of music that is! (Almost all of it is contained on the Hilliard Ensemble’s luminous collection of his sacred music.) “Ave Maria” is a hymn of praise to the Virgin Mary, yet the bass and upper parts slide down the scale, giving the opening phrases a plaintive, almost lugubrious quality. You can imagine the composer, with his celebrated basso voice, savoring the dark texture and rich low tones. The glory and joy lie in the ceaseless flow of melody, the piling up of vocal sound, and the expressive harmonic subtleties that keep each phrase spilling into the next.

The culmination of musical culture in Ockeghem’s day was the mass, and he was the undisputed master of it. An unvarying set of liturgical texts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei) is set to music of sublime intricacy and powerful unity. In each section, the tenor – literally, the “holder” of a fixed foundation melody – intones a Gregorian chant or chanson tune, while the other voices weave around him. Ockeghem’s 13 surviving masses form the highest mountain range in the landscape of late 15th-century music. Often, as in “Missa l’homme armé”, he based his works not on liturgical melodies but on popular songs – sometimes songs that he himself had written. He composed the earliest known polyphonic requiem mass, and in a frenzy of sublime gamesmanship, composed a mass, the “Missa prolationem,” entirely of intricately worked-out canons.

Today, we hear these masses as monumental multi-movement concert works, the Renaissance counterpart of the 19th-century symphony, but in Ockeghem’s time, the different sections were threaded together with prayers, chants, hymns, and other polyphonic works. Hearing a mass in isolation is like prying a statue from a church’s niche and placing it in a museum. We venerate the artwork by stripping it of context. Fortunately, Ockeghem’s music is sturdy enough to withstand such violent uprooting.

Today’s composers write for percussion, not because they’re hunting new species of music or craving alternatives to traditional ensembles, but because they can plug into a worldwide network of superb and devoted musicians always eager for more repertoire. Ensemble Mainz, Red Fish Blue Fish, Les percussions de Strasbourg, Third Coast Percussion, Steven Schick, Slagwerk Den Haag – these are the genre’s new brand names. In recent years, percussion ensembles have sprung up everywhere, cramming stages with eclectic assortments of noisemakers – vibraphones, geophones, telephones, soda bottles, kitchen sinks, oxygen tanks, two-by-fours, and anything else that will make a sound when you strike, stroke, bow, tap, or destroy it. They may be alienating their neighbors, but these percussionists unbound have also been making recordings and commissioning composers, and generally staking a claim to the musical mainstream.

Just now, the leader of the movement is probably the So Percussion, whose new album with the guitarist Greg McMurray, Where (we) Live features a dramatized ode to Brooklyn. The quartet’s members – Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting – are improvisers, composers, producers and musical entrepreneurs. They have teamed up with the DJ and composer Dan Deacon, commissioned pieces from Pulitzer-winners like Steve Reich and David Lang, and developed programs that are more theatrical extravaganzas than mere concerts. The reason for their success is simple: staggering ensemble virtuosity, which allows them to exhale the most complex scores like a single, multi-malleted organism.

So also benefits from a slow but persistent, century-long blooming of percussion. Beethoven foreshadowed that revolution (as he did so many others), with the mighty timpani phrase that interrupts the opening of the second movement of his Ninth Symphony. But true liberation would have to wait another 100 years or more.

What made it possible was the early 20th-century sense that there were few innovations left to squeeze out of harmony and melody and that only rhythm could express the energy of the machine age. Percussion was primitive, industrial, and deafening, and exciting – in a word, modern. George Gershwin accordingly used car horns and sirens in An American in Paris to capture the soundtrack of the postwar (Post-World War I, that is) metropolis. In 1924, an actual American in Paris, George Antheil, unleashed a platoon of pianos, xylophones, electric bells, propellers, sirens, drums and gongs in his Ballet Mécanique to produce a glorious contemporary cacophony. Around the same time, the Parisian in New York, Edgar Varèse composed Amériques, a gleefully assaultive work for an orchestra that included a baker’s dozen extremely busy percussionists. (A 1927 revision scaled that number down to nine.) The ease of crossing the Atlantic, in either direction, seems to have ushered in the golden age of din.

Percussion is not just about noise, of course – it’s about timbre, the complex colors of a sound that give it character, body, and movement. An expert percussionist can extract a dozen different qualities just from the collision between a pencil and a tabletop, and the search for nuances never stops. Though it was something of a discovery in the West, the Indonesian village orchestra, the gamelan, had long capitalized on this palette of percussion. That sonic richness bowled over the Californian composer Lou Harrison, who used the gamelan in many works.

Another California-born composer, John Cage, was intoxicated with the magic of timbre. In the 1940s, he invented what you might call a shoestring gamelan but he called a prepared piano, in which the strings are sown with weather stripping, paper, kitchen utensils, bolts, and rubber stops, all to wring as much variety as possible out of the homogeneous piano. Cage wrote a lot of music for prepared piano, in which he excavated a new kind of expressivity. Even though he transformed the romantic era’s lion of instruments into a tinkly, clanking thing, he still eked plenty of tragedy out of The Perilous Night, a nocturnal landscape of brittle, desert sounds and chilly flutterings of the soul.

Cage, who would have been 100 this year, cemented the percussion ensemble as one of the crucial musical forces of the 20th century. Cage has an enduring reputation as an impish iconoclast, gleefully torching conventions and leaving nothing but 4’33″ seconds of silence in their place. In truth, he sowed his catalog with more deliberately assembled masterpieces like Third Construction and Credo in Us. To build them, Cage developed a radically new rhythmic principle, in which the proportions of tiny phrases are the same as the largest structures, so that even the most irregular and complex works have a powerful internal logic.

Early in the century, percussion had seduced composers with its evocation of thrilling chaos and its many flavors of decibels; now it suggested a way to reclaim order. Steve Reich discovered how much complexity and rigor he could achieve with the sound of many hands clapping. Later, he composed the immense, cathedral-like Drumming for a homogenous collection of instruments. Percussion seems to attract the purist as much the rowdy, sometimes in the same person. Michael Gordon, who has in the past produced works of buzzing orchestral overload, recently composed Timber, an hour- long work of immense complexity for one of the simplest of all ensembles: a collection of store-bought 2x4s. It’s a haunting work, in which percussion has come full circle. The timbres of stick on wood thicken and multiply into a sonic pile so deep that they seem practically electronic – primitive sounds masquerading as high tech.

In 2004, the then-23-year-old Dudamel entered a conducting competition in which Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was on the jury. Salonen did more than make sure that the young Venezuelan won; he called LA, reporting to the Philharmonic brass that he had discovered someone special. “He’s a conducting animal,” he said. Five years later, Salonen left the orchestra and Dudamel took his place, a changeover that was celebrated as a kind of royal succession.

You can hear the reason for the excitement in his recordings – though not especially in the recordings he has made with the L.A. Philharmonic. By the time he took over that group, he had already spent a decade in charge of the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and under his leadership that group of young musicians continues to play with an explosive urgency that shames many more august ensembles. Listen to its version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring interlocking rhythms spark and jump in a fusion of primal pounding and industrial precision. The effect – fearsome, rousing, unnerving – is exactly what Stravinsky wanted but could hardly ever get, because once the score entered the canon of certified masterpieces, it lost its jagged edge. These young musicians have recovered the score’s extremes, the spasms of violence alternating with quiet, reverent frenzy.

Dudamel and his muchachos, as he refers to them, accept no settled wisdom, and in the recordings, they are constantly renegotiating the impact of even the most scriptural works. In the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony the string figures boil dangerously beneath the main theme, and (at 2:07) it’s the volcanic upwelling of those figures, rather than the principal trumpet call, that impels the music to its climax. In each dense fortissimo, you can make out the orchestras every hue, as if the conductor had sheared away the side of a sonic cliff, revealing all the layers and veins below.

Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra are both products of Venezuela’s now-famous nationwide music education program, nicknamed El sistema, which draws slum kids, among others, into orchestras by the thousands. The experience has been infectious. Other countries and cities – including L.A. – are trying to emulate El sistema‘s success, and a few Latin American composers are enjoying a sudden (though unfortunately mostly posthumous) surge in popularity. The orchestra’s calling card is a wildly joyous program called Fiesta, which combines the overpowering roar of Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá with the acrobatic dances of Ginastera’s Estancia – plus the sexiest, most combustible “Mambo” from West Side Story you will ever hear. In concert, the tux jackets come off to reveal warm-up gear in the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Violinists boogie as they play, bassists twirl their basses, and horn players blare skywards. But even without the choreography, you can sense the players’ sheer physical glee.

Not all works – or all orchestras – respond equally well to Dudamel’s relentless application of excitement. So far, the L.A. Phil’s few live recordings haven’t captured the incandescent quality of his best performances. Their reading of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is eminently respectable but it lacks charm or mystery, and sometimes seems to proceed from measure to measure out of a ponderous sense of duty. Dudamel displays greater kinship with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, but this is turf that the Angelenos had already covered sumptuously with his predecessor. Dudamel possesses enormous, potentially limitless talent, but it may take a while before Salonen’s orchestra becomes his, and before they can enjoy together all the marvelous music that takes place between bouts of spectacle and thunder.

You need only listen to the explosive opening seconds of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 8, Op. 59. No. 2 to sense the group’s devotion to specificity. The piece begins in shock. Two violent chords and then a series of frantic attempts to find a rhythmic footing amid gushes, silence, and a roiling current of 16th notes. The score is a touchstone of western music, but the Emerson plays it as a perilous improvisation. Mad staccato flights, sudden bouts of melancholy, bursts of uproarious joy — all these brutal extremes coexist with playing of matchless elegance.

A few long-running criticisms of the group are illuminating: They are pampered Americans and so have no access to the distinctive torment of, say, Shostakovich. They are mechanical virtuosos and slick generalists, indiscriminately slathering vastly different kinds of music in the same warm homogeneous tone. None of this is true. If the Emerson Quartet has overshadowed or outlasted its peers — the Juilliard, Tokyo, Cleveland, Takacs and many others — it’s because they play so much, and plunge so deeply in each composer’s stylistic world. They came to Haydn relatively late, but quickly became comfortable with his impish warmth and vinegary wit. They are equally at home with the searing austerity of Webern, with Bach fugues, and with the heated effusions of Dvorak.

Their enthusiasm for the immersive approach led them to perform all six mountainous Bartók quartets in a single marathon day, and to make a recording that is exquisitely attuned to the scores’ concentrated intensity. You could enter Bartók’s world almost anywhere — the all-plucked “allegretto pizzicato” fourth movement of the fourth quartet sizzles with fierce precision, for instance — but this is one collection that’s worth experiencing the way you would read a book, complete and in order, because it traces the brilliant arc of a difficult life.

The Emerson Quartet can play with breathtaking unity, every directional change of the bow miraculously synchronized, every accent weighted just so. Just how tight the ensemble is can be heard in an ebullient version of Mendelssohn’s Octet for strings that the composer wrote when he was still a teenager In concert, the Emerson has performed it with the excellent St. Lawrence String Quartet, but in the studio, the group teamed up with itself, to thrilling effect.

But as the players like to say, “Blending is easy.” The greater challenge is for four personalities to play together and yet remain distinct. “You wouldn’t want to see a play with four of the same character,” the violinist, Philip Setzer once told me.

That sense of the string quartet as chamber drama permeates the recordings of Shostakovich’s complete quartets, which were made in front of rapt audiences at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. Forget about consistency of tone or continuity. In these quartets, even the most gleeful passages contain a streak of horror, and even the gloomiest are shot through with laughter. Many Shostakovich mavens prefer the authentically Russian recordings that the Borodin Quartet made during the composer’s lifetime — dark, gnashing performances steeped in the terrors of life in the Soviet Union. The Emerson Americanizes this music — or universalizes it, perhaps — by showing that Shostakovich’s mixtures of banality and depth, of exaltation and numbness, travel very well. These performances are less desperate but subtler than the Borodin’s, and equally searching. The Emerson players need every ounce of their legendary flexibility in the Seventh Quartet, a one-movement memorial to the composer’s wife Nina that packs every conceivable stage of grief into twelve bristling minutes.

Fischer-Dieskau’s career overlapped almost completely with the era of the LP. From the late 1940s until the early 1990s, he appeared regularly in recitals and operas, but millions of listeners knew him from the almost indecent intimacy of his recordings. Lieder are wisps of music that can dissipate on their way from a concert stage to the back of an ample hall. Records allowed us, the legions he bewitched, to lie on the bed and let him minister to tender souls. He used the microphone’s sensitivity and allowed nothing to be lost or go missing. He zoomed into a line of verse or a few bars of music to reveal the song’s microscopic topography — a landscape that changed each time he approached it.

He was a master of detail, so let’s dip into minutiae for a moment. Listen, for instance, to “Erstarrung,” the devastating fourth song from Die Winterreise. The title means “Numbness,” but the violently bubbling piano part hints at barely contained emotions, as the singer confesses: “I search the snow in vain for the traces of her tread.” Almost immediately, we envision the narrator alone in the middle of a frozen field, his face inches from the frigid ground, his scalding tears slicing through ice to the soft, warm soil of the past. In his first recording, made in 1955 at the age of 30, Fischer-Dieskau delivers that image with thrilling bitterness, so that the words meinen heissen Tränen (“my hot tears”) toll like a clanging bell. A quarter-century later, he returned to the studio with the same cycle (and the great pianist Gerald Moore), and this time, the line soars weightlessly, with more legato, and in that tiny alteration, everything has changed. Instead of challenging, he is imploring; instead of blaring his wounded pride, he is searching for new ways to abase himself.

That may be a lot to read into subtle inflection, but this is music of obsession, and Fischer-Dieskau made recordings to be heard again and again, savored, and scrutinized. His singing rewards compulsive listening. That is exactly what some critics have had against him. They find him precious and stilted, so detailed in his interpretations that the essence leaches away. That almost sounds convincing — until you lower the needle on Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, and its opening burst of endearing clichés (“May,” “buds,” “love,” etc). Fischer-Dieskau sings the curling tendril of melody with utter simplicity — no knowing nudges here, except perhaps for a tiny pop on sprangen (“sprang”) — and leads the listener gently into the cycle’s emotional depths.

In the years after World War II (in which the teenaged baritone served as an army stablehand), Fischer-Dieskau represented the best of European culture. With that downy voice and baby face, he made an effortless connection between public art and private feelings. As soon as he opened his mouth, it became clear that German culture was about far more than national pride. He aged into a handsome star who was apparently indifferent to his own stature and immune to the distortions that come with fame. As his immense and wide-ranging discography attests, he never became a caricature of himself — never evolved into the fussy, mannered Herr Professor that could have so easily been his destiny.

He never lost the ability to knead together drama and nuance either. In Mahler’s intense Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) he burrows into the unstable emotional seesaw of old folk songs and refined modernity. Despite the lightness of his voice, he unfurled a supremely elegant performance as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. In spite of his Prussian reticence, he gives a poignant humanity to Verdi’s miserable jester, Rigoletto.

And somehow he set aside his congenital dignity long enough to unstopper great reserves of comic pathos in the title role of Verdi’s Falstaff.

The role of the large-livered high liver is miles away from the inner quiverings of Schubert’s songs, and yet I need only hear the first syllables of Falstaff’s disdainful attack on the idea of honor (“L’onore! Ladri!”) to know once again that I will stick with Fischer-Dieskau until he has dispensed the last drops of whatever passions he has on offer — longing, joy, fury, self-pity, pride or, in this case, scorn.

Since then, he has given many reliably revelatory performances, recorded the Ives Sonatas and the Bach Partitas with clarity and tenderness, collaborated sensitively with the violinist Joshua Bell, and now, in his Nonesuch debut, paired two avant-garde visionaries from different eras: György Ligeti, who died in 2006 and, yes, Beethoven again. Denk points out that while Beethoven’s “heroic” middle period molded generations of 19th-century composers, it was the unsettling, extreme and disorienting music he wrote in his last years that haunted the 20th century. On this recording, he frames Beethoven’s last sonata (No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111) with Ligeti’s sweetly diabolical Etudes. The first is a masterpiece of disintegration, the second of obsession, but across two centuries the two composers share a radical imagination and the ability to keep you off balance in frighteningly beautiful ways.

To call Denk a thoughtful pianist seems faint praise — like relegating him to the ranks of preciously cerebral interpreters who calculate the value of each grace note and burden every chord with oppressive deliberateness. Denk’s playing is more fluid and flexible than that. But his writings in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and on his own blog, Think Denk, have also made him a pianist/intellectual in the tradition of Charles Rosen, only wryer. “If you play a lot of Charles Ives,” he writes, “you have to put with the raised eyebrows of skeptics, who refer to him as ‘a crazy insurance salesman.’ This is frustrating. He was actually a spectacular insurance salesman.”

Denk’s writing is not incidental to his pianism. He plays as if thinking out loud — never hesitatingly, but always searching for a specific kind of wisdom, admitting the possibility of alternatives, and treating music as a fluid, uncertain art. In one blog entry on the Bach Violin Sonata, BWV 1017, he devotes a paragraph to four seconds of music, where the violin sustains an E-flat, while the keyboard shifts chords, turning the note into a dissonance.

I like the beat in-between: when the E-flat doesn’t know yet that it has been rethought. Where the melody’s and harmony’s tendencies clash, where the parts diverge, you get a kind of blurred double image of past and future. If you agree with me that Bach is a particularly profound essayist in the nature of time, you might agree with this leap of association: that dissonant beat is the present. It is neither here nor there. In its in-between-ness, it is the most beautiful, tastable moment of all. Why is it always the moment you want to hold onto, that is passing by?

That sort of sophisticated emotional analysis gives his recording of the Bach Partitas a rare humanism. The Sarabande in the Partita No. 4 is traditionally played at a tempo somewhere between slow and lugubrious, but he takes it at a startlingly brisk speed, so that ornaments become a garland of notes around a lilting dance. The result is a joy that seeps even into the most poignant moments. Denk has an optimistic sound.

He is also a connoisseur of chaos. There’s a famous moment midway through the second movement of Beethoven’s Op. 111 (at 6’28 in Denk’s recording) where the music tears away from its decorous melancholy and goes wheeling through a kind of crazy, syncopated Joplinesque proto-ragtime. In that moment, he draws the score from its chrysalis of convention to reveal its true wildness. There’s an unhinged giddiness to this passage that Denk doesn’t try to tame. He savors ambiguity, and when the music spins off into starscape trills and thin-air arpeggios, refusing to orbit back around to the opening theme, Denk is in his element. Whenever I read about climbers on Everest’s upper reaches losing their sense of urgency and self-preservation from lack of oxygen, I think of this ending, which Denk makes both inconclusive and terribly final.

These are not random, just-because-it-sounds-good collections; they’re carefully mapped excursions through some corner of musical experience. La Tarantella: Antidotum Tarantulae takes us to Salento, the heel tip of Italy’s boot, where until well into the 20th-century peasant women had a habit of becoming possessed with the spiritual poison of a tarantula’s bite. The call would go out to the village band, and when it arrived and started playing the pizzica, the victim would start to writhe in elaborately choreographed ecstasy. The music could go on for days, but eventually, she would stop dancing, return to consciousness and to the fields. Specialist groups like Aramiré might have a more authentically roughened sound, but L’arpeggiata connects a local ritual with far broader musical horizons.

Whether sacred or profane, each album is conceived as a mini-drama, full of contrast, conflict and romance. Via Crucis, for instance, bottles a spiritual fervor that borders on the carnal. From the first tones of the opening “Stabat Mater,” you know you are not in the precious, cloistered world of pure-voiced choirs. The timbre is raw and rustic, the sound of a village church on a parched southern Italian hillside. Spanish, Jewish and Arabic inflexions run through the instrumental improvisations. Luigi Rossi’s 17th-century song “Voglio morire” (“I Want to Die”) throbs with ravishing dissonance. The recording accompanies a processional along the way of the cross, not as a lugubrious trudge but a suite of slow-moving, sometimes tragic, sometimes joyful dances.

Nowhere does the group execute its recording-as-revue more deftly than in Monteverdi: Teatro d’amore, a greatest hits compilation of one of history’s greatest composers. From the brilliant, brassy toccata that opens the opera Orfeo (and this album) to the exquisite intertwining of Philippe Jaroussky’s and Nuria Rial’s voices in “Pur ti miro” from L’incoronazione di Poppea, to the bouncy madrigal “Zefiro torna” and the sepulchral harmonies that open “Hor che ‘l ciel e la terra,” Monteverdi’s music pulsates with color and expressive nuance.

Since its founding in 2000, L’arpeggiata has traced musical threads that unspool along trade routes and the paths of migration. In Los Pajaros Perdidos, the group goes to Latin America, binding traditional numbers like “Duerme negrito” and the heartbreaking “Alfonsina y el mar” with a souped-up quasi-mariachi version of Padre Antonio Soler’s 18th century “Fandango.” (For the harpsichord original, see here. This is dicier territory. Many listeners will know these melodies from the rousing versions by the Argentinian folk singer Mercedes Sosa or Susana Baca’s quiet, jazz-inflected take on Afro-Peruvian songs. But if L’arpeggiata is willing to risk coming off as a troupe of interlopers, it’s because they see the musical connections between the colonies and the conquistadors’ European homelands.

L’arpeggiata belongs to the third generation of the early-music movement. After the infant earnestness of the 1960s and ’70s, and the mature polish that performers like John Eliot Gardiner and Jordi Savall (and many, many others) achieved in the ’80s and ’90s, early music specialists have acquired enough self-confidence to un-specialize and play around. Like any good collection of improvisers, L’arpeggiata is at its best as a live band, driven by the personalities of its members. Onstage, the dancer Anna Dego gives a sensual and athletic physicality to dance forms like the ciaccona. Doron David Sherwin plays the baroque wooden cornett as if it were Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet letting medieval modes spill into bluesy solos. The throaty-voiced singer Lucilla Galeazzi moves easily among periods and dialects, so that the famous World War II resistance song “Bella ciao” belongs to the same world as the contemporary pop lullaby “Sogna fiore mio” and the traditional tarantella tune “Pizzicarella mia.”

This isn’t only the way we hear music today; it’s the way people outside the novelty-obsessed European courts have always experienced music. Ancient folk tunes, refined compositions, mangled imports, songs and dances of uncertain age and parentage — all had a place in the musical palette of every era, just as they do in ours.

Quasthoff’s story is one of extreme physical gifts and handicaps. Born in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1959 to a mother whose use of the drug thalidomide in pregnancy produced his disabilities, he spent a year and a half in an orthopedic rehab ward, much of it in traction, glassed off from his family to prevent infection. Excluded from ordinary schools, taunted by other children, sentenced to a horrific boarding school for the disabled, and rejected by the conservatory because he could not satisfy the requirement that he play an instrument, Quasthoff accumulated enough traumas to justify a lifetime of depression. Instead, he armed himself with a formidable wit and unquenchable good cheer. Though his repertoire consists largely of tragic songs, you can hear the undercurrent of optimism in his singing. Perhaps his musical genius comes from a close-up view of desperation and his refusal to be sucked under by it.

His disabilities have taken their toll on his career. Although he still sounds marvelous, he recently retired from the concert stage, saying that his health was no longer up to the demands of performing. He found opera exhausting and difficult, and only ever appeared once as Amfortas in Wagner’s Parsifal and another, equally memorable time, as Don Fernando in Beethoven’s Fidelio. His charismatic rendition of Leporello’s aria “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni makes you wish he had sung the role onstage. Of course in a career so rich, long and varied, it hardly makes sense to dwell on what he did not do — except to note that he may never have sung a shoddy note or uttered a lazy phrase.

He sings Mahler, in particular, with a combination of intelligence and terrifying sincerity. Kinterdotenlieder unites the consoling with the horrific, the familiar and the uncanny, and Quasthoff guides listeners through the fantastical landscape of Mahler’s orchestral songs with stark reportorial simplicity and deep wells of emotion.

Quasthoff sings like one who listens. Bach’s Cantata BWV 82, “Ich habe genug,” begins with an oboe in serene and melancholy dialogue with the gentle lapping of strings. Then the voice enters with the biblical words of the frail old Simeon (from Luke II, 22–32), who has postponed his death long enough to embrace the infant Jesus: “I have [seen] enough.” Quasthoff declaims that line with the lyrical simplicity of a great actor.

The more pared down the music, the more evident his talents. In Schumann’s Dichterliebe he achieves a sublime naiveté. In Schubert’s melodies, which seduce many singers into self-pitying sentiment or excessive drama, Quasthoff never honks or booms. Instead, he planes over a phrase the way a surfer rides a wave, with an instinctive feel for its contour. In the song “Ungeduld” from Die Schöne Müllerin, he delivers each repetition of “Dein ist mein Herz” (“Yours is my heart”) as a simple statement of fact. Love exists, and attention must be paid.

In recent years, he has gone public with his fondness for jazz standards and American popular song of a nostalgic hue. He sings these tunes stylishly, without stiffness or affectation (and in excellent English), but also without great insight. Maybe he wasn’t born to be a nightclub entertainer, but considering the circumstances of his birth and what he made of them, it’s reasonable to hope that working with a microphone and an electric trio might yet give him another fine chapter of an astonishing career.

Lang Lang could only have emerged when and where he did. A rapidly modernizing China supplied his father, Lang Guoren, with both the freedom and the dream to quit his job as a policeman in the industrial city of Shenyang and move with his five-year old son to a Beijing slum. The father was insanely determined to turn the boy into a classical music superstar, even if it meant destroying him in the process. It’s hard for even the most fiercely ambitious parent to imagine urging a child to commit suicide rather than face the shame of mediocrity, but when his nine-year-old son failed to get into the Beijing Central Conservatory, Lang Guoren screamed at him to jump off a high-rise balcony.

China gets an early credit for the production of Lang Lang, but it was the West that completed him. Educated at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute from the age of 15, he quickly learned to harness the elaborate apparatus of star-making: the concert circuit, management teams, PR resources, record labels, fashion, and media machinery. The story came full circle when he became an idol in China, which has a far greater appetite than Europe or the United States for a Chopin-playing rock star.

There are countercultural strains in his story as well. At a time when classical music’s prestige and glamour are flickering, Lang Lang has leveraged it into global celebrity. Recordings are increasingly low-budget affairs of limited circulation, yet he has revived the lavishly produced CD. Culture gets disseminated today mostly in digital vapors, but Lang Lang makes a point of being physically present here, there, and everywhere, keeping a travel schedule that would tax an airline pilot and giving 200 concerts a year. At a time when renown has become Kardashianized and people become famous for doing virtually nothing, and doing it badly, he is both a serious artist and a contender for the title of “Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.”

At 29, Lang Lang the musician is even resisting domination by Lang Lang the concept. For much of his early career (and so far, that’s all he’s had), he has courted the love of audiences and the suspicions of critics with an extreme, extroverted style that treated the composer’s intentions as a starting point for hugely entertaining whizbangery. His trademark was excess, and he took an equal opportunity approach to good taste and tastelessness. There was a sense, though, that all this youthful exuberance was a phase, just part of the trajectory: planned obsolescence, leading to an upgrade.

But maybe that’s not what’s going on.

“After a decade of waiting for Lang Lang to grow up, to get over his circus act and become the magnificent artist that has always seemed to be [his] calling,” wrote the critic Mark Swed, “I finally gave up…and began to accept him for the pianist he is.” The Lang Lang that concert audiences hear most nights now is no longer either prodigy or product, but a performer comfortable with just about any interpretive approach, who flits nonchalantly from the ferocious to the sublime, the mechanical to the eccentric. What distinguishes him as a pianist is not a consistent voice, but a mercurial quality, the feeling that any one bar of music doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the next.

That changeability can be infuriating, it can feel false and superficial, or it can be utterly thrilling. Listen, for instance, to his performance of Chopin’s A-flat Major Polonaise from a live concert he gave in Vienna in 2010. The piece begins with an introduction that accelerates, slows, pauses, and reverses course, until it finally bursts into a joyful dance. Lang Lang exaggerates all the stutter-steps changes almost to the point of psychosis, and when the polonaise rhythm finally strikes up, the tempo remains scarily unstable, as if the dance floor were slicked with oil.

The essence of this playing is spontaneity, which doesn’t jibe well with his perfectionism, or with the demands of a studio recording. Maybe that’s why so many of the tracks on his latest recording “Liszt: My Piano Hero” have a certain stiffness, as if his inspiration and energy hardened a little more with each take. In the 2004 concert recording Live at Carnegie Hall he plays Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 with an oddly fitful beat, but it has a ravishing idiosyncratic energy. He plays the same piece on the “Piano Hero” CD, only now it sounds like the outcome of a strategy. In a performer so dynamic and self-conscious, the discography lags behind the development. But it’s a good bet that as Lang Lang ages, the live recordings will continue to capture this consummate creature of the concert stage, while the studio projects will be polished to a dead sheen.

Before the Kronos coalesced, the string quartet was among the purest forms of chamber music. It had evolved in the stuccoed rooms of European capitals and developed an audience of specialized aficionados. Composers from Haydn to Shostakovich used the combination of intimacy and variety to express their most private and complex ideas, and those works remained in the hands of few enduring ensembles like the Borodin and the Juilliard.

At first, the Kronos Quartet irritated the classical music establishment but wowed new fans with colored stage lights, an evolving designer wardrobe, its liberal use of amplification, and a repertoire that kept squirming out of every conceivable category. Even its critics admired the group for cajoling hundreds of composers into writing for them, and for proving that the venerable string quartet was not a worn-out genre. By now, the Kronos Quartet is the establishment: Without them, it’s impossible to imagine the Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars, Ethel, Eighth Blackbird, the Turtle Island String Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, Brooklyn Rider, or any number of other of similarly eclectic, electric and dramatic ensembles focused on new music and idiosyncratic combinations.

Nevertheless, say the word “opera” to most non-specialists, and what they will think of first probably originated in the collection of city-states and principalities called Italy between the end of the 18th century and the early 20th, a period that spans Rossini’s rollicking comedies, the dazzling filigree of bel canto composers like Donizetti and Bellini, the dark grandeur of Verdi, and the emotional intensity of Puccini. For all their differences, these composers tapped a common vein of lyricism — a melodic mother lode that ran the whole length of this complex sliver of land.

During that period, opera was the most intricate, most spectacular, most ambitious and most popular form of entertainment in the Western world, with none of the reputation for highfalutin’ exclusivity that afflicts the genre today. Its composers were showbiz men, rehashing other people’s ideas, cranking out new scores to the producer’s specifications, tailoring arias to their stars’ strengths and foibles, and adapting their styles to changing fashions. They were, by and large, not purists. They made a good deal of their money, after all, publishing sheet music excerpts for amateurs to sing and play at home.

Given opera’s flexibility and its need for the advanced technology of stagecraft (gas lights!) it’s not surprising that at the turn of the 20th century, singers were among the first to understand the potential of gramophones. Some of the very earliest recordings feature operatic excerpts, and from then on, the histories of the art and the technology were intertwined. LPs and CDs permitted opera lovers to listen to evening-length works with a minimum of interruption, DVDs brought theatrical productions into the well-equipped home, and high-definition broadcasts have extended the live theatrical experience — into movie theaters. It’s a big subject: What follows is an introductory anthology of highlights in the spirit of those sheet music “hit singles” that made opera profitable in 19th-century Milan.

Early works that announced the arrival of a major new voice in American music

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams’s hugely successful stage works — Nixon In China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic among them — have changed the operatic landscape, but there was a time when he was a little-known figure working on the margins of San Francisco’s new music scene. This recording, released in 1987, revisits two early works that announced the arrival of a major new voice on the American music scene.

“Shaker Loops,” for seven strings, a work from 1978, is Adams’s first masterpiece. Inspired by the ecstatic rituals of the American religious sect known as Shakers, and the repetitive/modular music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, “Shaker Loops” builds to a frenzied climax through a steady accumulation of minimalist patterns. In 1983, Adams produced “Available Light,” a three-way collaboration with choreographer Lucinda Childs and architect Frank Gehry. The original dance score was built around the rapidly evolving sound of the synthesizer, but once into the recording studio, Adams added a brass ensemble — often used so subtly that it is not even heard, but simply adds an organic sheen to the electronic sound. He called this version “Light Over Water,” a three-movement symphony that also uses looping and repeating musical patterns in an almost oceanic play of fast and slow, light and dark. This piece too builds to a grand finale, as the brass are freed from their support role and send the music soaring to its conclusion on a wave of trumpet calls and major chords.

Few composers can cover as much expressive territory with such insouciant agility

Both Thomas Adès's Tevot and his Concentric Paths are colossal without being long, because few composers today can cover as much expressive territory with such insouciant agility. Adès doesn't fetishize complexity, but he isn't scared of it either, and there are moments in both works when the textures become so thick and layered that it's hard to discern what's going on. The overload is deliberate, and the composer never fails to lead the listener into a clearing of hard, kaleidoscopic clarity. Tevot is gorgeously insane. In the opening, violins caress glassy harmonics, creating an effect of crystals bobbing in mid-air. Somewhere in another galaxy, various bangs, big and small, gather into a hurtling ball of sound; eventually, the score reaches a plateau of bliss, an endless exhalation of melody. The Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths, is equally eerie, not in a dimestore-spooky way, but in the sense that every note is pregnant with explosive possibilities. The fiddle speaks, and the orchestra flares, intensifying the solo line's terrors and contorting its logic. In the second movement, the violin declaims a Bach-like chord, and the brasses chime in with a sharp metallic blurt that magnifies the sound to surreal proportions — a murmur into a P.A. system. A moment later, violin and stammering brass veer apart, and the passage shatters into a Cubist still life.

Best capturing the piece's mix of giddiness and profundity

For connoisseurs of the sublime, Schubert's string quintet is a kind of private cellar: a repository of excellence, worthy of special reverence. The opening chord sneaks in out of the silence as if uttered in mid-thought, followed by uncertain, meandering measures that suddenly break into a brilliant "Eureka!" These quicksilver emotional changes, the push-pull of rhythms that stretch and then snap into place, the heartbreaking lyricism of the Adagio, with its poignant pizzicatos, the fierce joy of the Scherzo — the whole unbelievable spectrum of human emotions packed into three quarters of an hour — all demand performers of almost guru-like wisdom. The Alban Berg Quartet, supplemented by the cellist Heinrich Schiff, made this recording in 1982, and it's still the one that best captures the piece's mix of giddiness and profundity. The last movement begins at a measured prance, but you can hear the cellos pawing the turf, itching to break into a gallop. When that rush finally arrives in the final measures, the players, keenly aware that the 32-year old Schubert died just a couple of months after finishing the score, make it sound like a frantic, blissful dash off a cliff into the wild unknown.

Documenting the richness of a musical life that predated and somehow survived World War II

Opera recordings rarely become legendary any more — there are too many options, too much history, too many niggling perfectionists. But in 1952, this scorching and sublime interpretation — Wilhelm Furtwängler's first complete opera recording and the first studio version of Tristan und Isolde — could still acquire scriptural status. For one thing, it documents the richness of a musical life that predated and somehow survived World War II. In her late 50s, Kirsten Flagstad could no longer manage the high C's in Act II (Elizabeth Schwarzkopf supplied them instead), but her Isolde combines rapturous fragility with fearsomeness. Ludwig Suthaus may have sung more brightly in earlier days, but you need only listen to his explosive cry of "Isolde!" in Act II to hear that even in decline he loomed above the top of everyone else's game.

Furtwängler died two years after making this recording, and he does not always demand the highest technical polish from the Philharmonia Orchestra, but what he does deliver is an irreproducible sense of dramatic clarity and psychological nuance. In the Act III Prelude, he draws ferocious depths of sound out of the low strings and the blinding finale contains within it all the exhaustion and exhilaration of the opera's emotional journey. Mature artists at the apex of their wisdom made this recording, and they had the good fortune of doing so before producers insisted on expunging technical glitches with tyrannical perfectionism.

No other singer on record has made opera a more volatile, life-giving art

Maria Callas could swerve between doomed tenderness, wistful charm, vindictive ferocity, girlish giddiness and regal aloofness more quickly and totally than most singers can find a pitch. This three-disc set can't cover the full extent of her mercurial musical personality, but it comes close. In "Un bel dì" from Madama Butterfly, she focuses her sound into a hot beam of longing. In "Sempre libera" from La Traviata, she merges the Violetta's slightly manic hilarity with a foretaste of the despair to come. She pumps "O don fatale" (from Don Carlo) full of buzzing rage; nobody ever sang the words "ti maledico" ("I curse you") with more bloodcurdling conviction. There was always a hint of calamity in her voice. You can hear that total embrace of danger in the high notes that threaten to spin off into the ether, in her willingness to risk an ugly sound, in the way she sprints and slips through filigreed passages, less concerned with perfect execution than with the emotional extremes they represent. No other singer on record has made opera a more volatile, life-giving art.

In which a mercurial 24-year-old soon-to-be superstar transforms Chopin

In 1965, a mercurial 24-year-old Argentinian pianist with a dense mane of dark hair strode into the Abbey Road studios in London and by the time she emerged a few days later, Chopin had been transformed from a frail sensualist into a composer of magnificent roars.

Since a copyright conflict kept it confined to the vaults, very few people actually heard that recording, and by the time it was released 35 years later, Argerich was a senior celebrity. But still today, it evokes a young pianist taking pleasure in her power and discovering exhilarating ferocity of Chopin's music. The A-flat Polonaise bubbles up out of the low register like molten rock. The final movement of the Third Piano Sonata opens with great gonging chords that build into a festive clangor. So intense is the energy of these performances that merely listening to it feels like an athletic feat. Later in life, Argerich would sometimes obliterate nuances in a stampede of notes but here she plays the Nocturne No. 4 with feathery caress, diaphanous rubato, and phrasing so immediate and spontaneous as to seem practically erotic.

Uncanny technique meets enlivening joy

Natalie Dessay's quicksilver soprano darts so effortlessly into crystal-shattering range that it's tempting to simply be ensorcelled by her agility and range and leave it at that. But in this collection of French musical pearls, she shows off a much finer quality: charm. Whether she's singing a courtesan, an ingénue, or desperate Ophelia, she imbues each roulade and leap with joy at being able to produce those preternatural sounds.

Dessay made two recordings of French Opera Arias: the first includes the "Bell Song" from Lakmé and her miraculous version of the "Doll Song" from Les Contes d'Hoffmann; this one, made a few years later, has her romping through rarities. Perhaps you never realized that François-Adrien Boieldieu and Ambroise Thomas were missing from your collection; Dessay's green tendrils of vocalism make them seem essential. But not everything here is exotica: In "Ah! Je veux vivre" from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, she projects the disorientation of fresh love with all those chains of awed sighs and giddy scales, made somehow more enchanting by her exacting discipline. There isn't another singer working today who can balance the transports and the technique of coloratura with such dramatic refinement.

The baritone burrows his way into the scalding heart of these tragic songs

Schubert's song cycle is about returning single-mindedly to irretrievable emotions, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau revisited this wrenching music with a doggedness that bordered on obsession. Mavens will argue whether he was at his most refined in 1955, '63, or '66, some will detect some falloff by '72, and many would listen to the '80, '86, or '90 versions with more respect than adoration. This is the 1963 vintage, the second recording he made with Gerald Moore for EMI, and it finds the baritone desperately trying to burrow his way into the scalding heart of Schubert's tragic songs, without letting a breath of pathos creep into his interpretations; only poise, sensitivity, intelligence, and wisdom. But it's the restlessness — the search — that matters, both to the grieving young man of the poems, who goes stumbling through the snow and ice in search of some way to salve his suffering, and to the artist who channels him. At the piano, Moore is the ultimate partner, conjuring up the terrain, the cold, and the past. His sympathy with the singer — the way they breathe and move together — paradoxically sharpens Schubert's depiction of exquisite loneliness.