Florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say

With Infernal Machines, Darcy James Argue seemed to come out of nowhere: Who was this guy who wrote tunes drawing equally from the big band tradition as well as post-rock and classical minimalism? Why did he call his music “steampunk-jazz?” The reality was that this composer-bandleader came from the practice hall, where he’d been drilling his band for several years. Infernal Machines bowled us over with a fully formed, highly unique vision.

Brooklyn Babylon is his follow-up and, after a Grammy nod as well as three of DownBeat’s “rising star” awards, the album has got a lot of following up to do. A 53-minute suite originally written as one half of a visual-art-and-music spectacle at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in 2011, the studio-recording version of Brooklyn Babylon raises a few questions of its own: Is this a proper jazz record, or is it a one-dimensional document of a live multi-media project? And: does it matter?

The answer does matter. If this were just a callback to some live event, it would be of interest mostly to those who attended the shows. But the first two tracks — “Prologue” and “The Neighborhood” — advertise that the new music here will be able to carry this idiosyncratic album on its own terms. The first piece features some high-spirited marching band romping-about, as well as a striking tenor sax solo from Sam Sadigursky. The second tune, after opening with a minimalist piano quote from LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” pairs electric bass with a sweetly idyllic clarinet solo that never gets too saccharine, thanks to some tart, brassy interruptions in the background. (Argue didn’t win that “arranger” DownBeat award for nothing.) The whole thing blooms into an electric guitar-driven section that, in turn, deftly morphs back into a reprise of its opening piano motif.

And there’s still more than 40 minutes of inventive music like that left to discover. Some of the pieces feature wooden flutes, others Afro-Peruvian percussion. Ingrid Jensen’s electric trumpet solo in “Building” calls to mind Miles’s best fusion bands. That all these sounds work together so elegantly is evidence of expert execution, not just singular vision; the entire program flows in a way that many modern-classical composers ought to envy. And you don’t need to look up the plotline of the (wordless) stage show — it was about an architect commissioned to build the world tallest carousel amid “embattled neighborhoods” — in order to enjoy the music. Argue’s curiosity and skill at integrating all his fascinations represent the humanism of the narrative capably on its own. Both florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say (and the ambition to match), Brooklyn Babylon is essential listening for all sorts of musical communities.

New York's violist of choice retains her aesthetic imprint

Nadia Sirota is the violist of choice for the New York contemporary-classical scene, and on Baroque, she follows up her astoundingly assured debut, First Things First, with fresh works from many of the composers who contributed to that recording. Judd Greenstein’s piece for seven violas (all of them multitracked by Sirota), “In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves,” employs a variety of dizzying riffs, separated by episodes of subtle pizzicato, in order to evoke the many stages of cosmos-crossing undertaken by the famous “Golden Record” shot into deep space by NASA back in 1977. It’s also a tour de force opportunity for Sirota to show off her otherworldly chops and a variety of techniques: Nico Muhly’s jaunty “Etude 3″ is as memorable as the two others in his series, which he gave Sirota the first time around, and is a showcase for Sirota the player.

But there are new composers this time as well, even if they are generally familiar to the New Amsterdam coterie. Shara Worden’s “From the Invisible to the Visible” is a brief, attractive offering that introduces keyboards and organs into the mix to considered effect. Missy Mazzoli’s “Tooth and Nail” continues the electronic theme and is the album’s standout, featuring some exciting hyper-glitch programming by the composer in during its opening minutes. Solid pieces from Paul Corley and Daniel Bjarnason complete this satisfying program, which, while more tricked-out electronically than Sirota’s first offering, retains her aesthetic imprint.

A song cycle that provides a valuable service

“I just chose to conveniently ignore what I would have to do with a gun in my hand.” That’s just one of the oral-history tidbits taken from interviews with real-life veterans that composer/drummer David T. Little includes in his song cycle Soldier Songs. Little’s mini-opera, workshopped at New York City Opera in early 2008 before seeing its first full production in 2011, can feel like a letter from the recent past — a time when news breaks regarding fresh American casualties in Iraq were more front-of-mind for the nation.

Despite averring in the liner notes that he’s become less reflexively dismissive of those participating in the national war effort — especially in light of having interviewed the veterans who speak in this recording — there’s an unmistakable sardonic quality to the first two “acts” of Little’s opus. In “Real American Heroes,” a jejune recruit — sung by a baritone in falsetto voice — fantasizes about serving the nation, with jaunty 6/4 time. Seconds later, in deep adult voice, he’s “killing all the bad guys” in a breathless, whirling 11/16 meter. By the time of “Boom! Bang! Dead! (Rated “T” for Teen),” the focus of Little’s fine instrumental writing — composed with the virtuosos of the Newspeak ensemble in mind — has moved from a lead flute line to a machine-gun-riffing electric guitar part. A little on-the-nose, perhaps, but thrillingly done.

But it’s in the final stretch that Little’s chamber-opera finds a depth beyond its initial cynicism (and easy-joke titles). “Every Town Has a Wall” and “Two Marines” are both driven by post-war reflections, and it’s in those songs that Little reaches for the complexity of mood that also made Phil Kline’s Zippo Songs a modern classic. After that, this (exquisitely engineered) recording of Soldier Songs returns to oral-history mode, using new dialogue from our real-life soldiers. It’s a long coda, and perhaps robs the album of its proper climax, which comes in “Two Marines.”

Though traditional enjoyment may not be the point, either — precisely because we may be prone to think we’ve moved past the “Global War on Terror” era (drone strikes to the side), Little’s songs feel important, even necessary. “Most veterans won’t talk about it unless it’s with another veteran. Cuz people really don’t know how they’re feeling, unless it’s somebody that’s been there” runs another one of the real-life ex-grunt’s lines. For the many of us who haven’t been there, but remain responsible in our own ways for thinking through these issues, Soldier Songs provides a valuable service.

But once 2012 was over, Tharaud’s resume looked a bit different — if only because he had managed to find himself associated with two (very) different cultural milestones. First, EL James selected one of Tharaud’s past recordings for the Fifty Shades of Grey: The Classical Album. And then there’s Tharaud’s acting debut, in director Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated Amour — a film about an elderly married couple navigating the increasingly difficult challenges of aging together. In Haneke’s script, the wife, played by longtime French film actress Emmanuelle Riva, is a retired piano instructor. Haneke had a bright idea for casting the role of her brightest former pupil: an actual pianist.

The relationship worked out: The film got a great soundtrack (and a key performance), while Tharaud found another way to distinguish himself. Just ahead of Oscar season, eMusic’s Seth Colter Walls chatted with Tharaud (whose English is also great, bien sur) about a busy year, and whether or not he’s got the acting bug for real these days.

This is a quite a first film-acting role.

Yes. And maybe my last role!

Why? You were great in the film, especially since you had to hold your own with some titans of French acting.

You know, my life is music, classical music — and…I thought I’m not a good actor. In this film I play my role — myself. My name is “Alexandre,” and it’s a story not far from the reality of my life! But I think as an actor there are four thousand young actors better than me.

Fair enough. But one doesn’t get cast in a Michael Haneke movie by accident. How did it come about?

At the beginning, Haneke wanted a pianist — a true pianist. Because, you know, in a lot of movies, you can see an actor imitating a pianist. It’s horrible! For me, it’s horrible. So Haneke organized a casting with 20 or 30 pianists, but it was not fine for him. Finally, his assistant called me, and I won the role. But I was not sure to I was such a good choice, because I am not an actor! Finally I said to Michael Haneke: “Ask me what you want and I will try to do it.” So it was…very simple for me. I’m a pianist so I’m used to playing on an instrument — the piano. But this time I was an instrument. It was very exciting!

How was it, working with actors as iconic as Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant?

For me, [Jean-Louis] is a god of the French cinema. And so I asked him and Emanuelle, I asked them, “Can you give me some advice, maybe? I’m not a good actor!” But they say all the time, “You’re perfect. Don’t change, don’t move; it’s perfect.” So they were very, very nice to me.

Did Haneke talk to you much about his selections for the soundtrack? The Schubert pieces have a quite prominent role in the film, and one suspects Haneke was quite set on them from the start.

He wanted this program. But he asked me if I wanted to change [anything]. And I said, “No, I want to be your instrument, so I want to go your way.” So during the recording he was in the studio. Like an artistic director, it was very interesting to work [through] the music with him. Because, maybe you know this, but he plays the piano; he’s a good musician. So it was interesting for me to record this CD with him; it was completely different.

Did he offer interpretive suggestions as you went along?

For example, the first impromptu by Schubert: I used to play this piece faster. And he wanted the tempo slower. And finally I choose his tempo; it was the first time in my life, to choose the tempo of another person! It was very interesting. But I think his tempo is better than mine!

Not to change the subject too drastically, but this was the second “soundtrack” of yours this year. A past Bach recording of yours was selected for the Fifty Shades of…

Hahahahaha!

OK, so you were aware of this.

Yes, I know of it. But I don’t know the book. [Pause] I’m not…the best person to read the book? I know that it’s…in France, a lot of women [read it]. I don’t know the story, but I know it’s a story with sex and allure — and so it was funny to be in the CD. [Laughs again.] Do you like this book?

No, I haven’t read it either.

Hahaha!

Are you at all excited to keep going with acting, if you can fit it in your touring and recording schedule?

Well, I don’t know if I’m the best pianist of the world — but I know I am not the best actor…Maybe if Spielberg or another great director called me — why not? But after Haneke, it’s difficult.

A heavy and serious program that complements the film

Mere months after Le Boeuf sur le toit, the young French pianist Alexandre Tharaud’s strut through the jazz-classical repertoire of the “Swinging Paris” cabaret scene of the 1920s, comes something entirely different in mood: a heavy and serious program that serves as the soundtrack to the Michael Haneke film about late-stage love, Amour.

In the film, Tharaud offers a more-than-serviceable turn as a famed international piano recitalist, a surprising move that only confirms the musician’s range as an artist. You can hear the same range in this soundtrack — from his stark reading of two iconic Schubert Impromptus to the controlled surges of energy present on the three bagatelles by Beethoven (his first official recordings of that composer’s writing for piano). And while Tharaud recorded all of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux” for another label in 2000, the third of the series has greater clarity in this new version.

That clarity extends to the soundtrack’s standouts, both here and in the film: The two Impromptus, specifically the first and third. Murray Perahia may have suggested a greater number of moods in his recording of Impromptu No. 1, but Tharaud’s weighty consideration here is reliably gripping. When playing the No. 3 in G Minor, meanwhile, Tharaud doesn’t overdose on the dreaminess of the initial theme like some pianists; there’s a darkness that he allows to creep in, but the beauty is still there even if it isn’t at the forefront. In that way, it’s a fitting complement to Haneke’s film, which hints at the qualities of a decades-long love story by emphasizing some of its bleakest hours.

Tharaud’s half hour of piano recordings for the film are so excellent that the closing snippets of dialog taken from the final edit feel tacked on and unnecessary (even if you speak French). While it could be of minor interest to have Tharaud’s big scene immortalized as audio, where he really speaks, naturally, is in his playing.

The opening act was Mario Diaz de Leon, a young man currently studying for his PhD in composition at Columbia University’s graduate school of music. He was at the club in order promote his new solo album, described by its distributing label as full of “ethereal synths, brutal distortion, noise and dark ambient.” All true. (Diaz de Leon’s previous album was more recognizably “contemporary classical” in nature; it was performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, and was issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.) You can hear a interest in brutalizing instrumental textures on both albums, but it’s Hypnos that makes the more overt attempt to engage a rock-genre audience.

Sometimes watching a knob-twiddler at his console is a recipe for boredom, but drawing from his 2012 release in front of the local black metal crowd, Diaz de Leon proved hard to ignore. While supplementing his own electronic programming with bravura riffs on guitar, he more than held the audience’s attention — including Liturgy frontman Hunter-Hunt Hendrix. Approached during an interval between bands, Hendrix told me he’d only met Diaz de Leon a couple times, but offered that they shared a mutual respect, while adding that he thought Diaz de Leon’s music was “fucking awesome.” (Test the arpeggios in “Faithless” in order to verify Hendrix’s correctness.)

At the merch table afterward, as people picked up both his new CD as well as his past one for Zorn’s label — sort of gently asking “what’s this here” — I wanted to start proselytizing for the other works in this emerging canon of rock-influenced new classical music that sounds more like Krallice than Grizzly Bear. But of course Diaz de Leon was doing fine carrying the torch for this music himself. As I look back on the new music that impressed me the most this year, that album is not just one of the highlights on the merits: It also did more than its share to move our contemporary classical appreciation along a piece.

As it happens, overlap of influences and performance practices goes way beyond the dabbling of “bigger” indie-rock names like The National or Grizzly Bear, permeating some more subterranean levels of rock extremity. The classical music intermingling that happens at this level is less talked-about than the music roped into the much-debated catch-all phrase “indie-classical,” but it’s thornier, darker and no less interesting.

Tristan Perich‘s music for acoustic instruments and 1-bit electronics, for example, is too far afield of anything resembling “indie” rock to merit useful comparison. But the texture of his electronics — beautiful in their harsh simplicity — does place it within hailing distance of other underground music (whether in minimal techno or electronic-aided rock) that isn’t commonly thought to have a relationship with modern classical: you can hear some of the most out-sounding techno from the Kompakt label in it, for example. Perich’s 19-minute piece “Formations” was recorded by cellist Mariel Roberts this year, and is the equal of any modern hardcore act like Converge for raw power. Laurie Spiegel, a godmother of computer music, saw her landmark 1980 LP The Expanding Universe issued for the first time on CD this year. It notched a “best new reissue” garland from Pitchfork, as did a monumental 12-CD set of early electronic pieces by Pauline Oliveros.

The recognition of these early noise/classical pioneers was overdue, considering how long other early programmers of the fabled New York City arts-space The Kitchen, such as Rhys Chatham, have always had pride of place in underground rock circles. Still, even if overlong in coming, it was gratifying, as was the flutter of attention paid to 80th-birthday celebrations in honor of Oliveros, whose early synthesizer compositions heralded the rise of noise as a genre 20 years before Yamatsuka Eye ever drove a bulldozer through the back wall of a Japanese club.

And yet, biographical worthiness aside, why this year? It hardly seems coincidental that Spiegel and Oliveros both drew new fans in 2012 at a time when their analog or primitivist-digital sounds found new attention in extreme-music circles. In the lower-decibel end of extreme music, the texture-fiend field best described as “scrape” carries tendrils of association reaching back to Oliveros. You can hear the continuation of her avant-classical influence on Kristin Norderval’s extraordinary album of “post-ambient arias” for laptop and voice, “Aural Histories,” which was released on Oliveros’s Deep Listening label. (Check “Gameplay” for the sample-based approach to scrape, and “Extreme Weather” for oscillating noise.)

Elements of scrape — as well as brawnier guitar sounds — were also in evidence on Where (we) Live, one of two releases by the So Percussion ensemble (the first version of “Five Doors Down” has the post-Oliveros improv scrape and noise, while “Strange Steps” hops closer toward traditional indie). Given all of this, 2012 might best be remembered as the year that the aesthetic descriptor “indie-classical” finally outlived its usefulness, in part due to broad overuse but also because of the exploding diversity of the stylistic grab-bag that has made the last few years in classical music so exciting.

This music, part of what you could call a new classical extremity, offers a new way to think of the ways rock-borne influences manifest themselves. Rock acts that have demanded a certain span of attention — Swans, whose monolithic, two-hour record The Seer garnered widespread adulation this year, comes to mind — may have also influenced some new conservatory students, who have imported the endurance-test nature of avant-metal and noise into chamber works. And the space opened up by experimental rock artists has trained some potential new audiences, like those who are wowed by Mario Diaz de Leon before they even have a chance to hear Liturgy.

As for the erstwhile drummer of that controversial black metal band, he started a new project this year, too. Christened Guardian Alien, and featuring Liturgy’s Bernard Gann on bass, they hardly abandoned the chamber-music running time: with a single 37-minute track of stoner-vocal-drone and post-minimalist improvisation, they gave up any legitimate claim on their previous project’s black metal fetish. But their experimentation with rock and avant-classical innovations continued apace. It’s as though that was the real project all along.

A subtle auteur in an age of outsized R&B innovators

Just what kind of R&B visionary is the ascendant star Miguel? While every bit as ambitious Frank Ocean and just as committed to the craft of songwriting as Terius Nash, aka The-Dream, Miguel is far less interested in making big conceptual statements. Because of this, it’s hard to know right away who he is, exactly, or what his goals are. Is he a fearless freak? An introvert? A do-you crooner? Or a canny chart-seeker?

The answer turns out to be all of the above. His first album ran 43 minutes and opened with a sharp, undeniable pop song (“Sure Thing”). Kaleidoscope Dream is 42 minutes, and kicks off with the already-popular lead single “Adorn,” a supplicant’s mid-tempo jam with a telling angle: Miguel makes the case for his lover-man bona fides not on it’ll-move-the-earth-under-your-feet grounds, but because it’ll work for what you’ve already got going on, like a sharp accessory: “Let my love adorn you,” he pleads modestly. The self-negation involved in his come-ons — he openly requests to be defiled during “Use Me” — gives more insight into what might be driving Kaleidoscope Dream than its title does.

There’s a bashful quality even on some of the more direct offerings. “Don’t Look Back” starts out in radio-courting fashion but closes with a surprise coda that reveals a songwriter’s affinity for making every part of a pop song count. He only stumbles towards the end, with “Candles in the Sun,” which flicks at a social consciousness he hasn’t figured out how to carry as convincingly as the seduction-and-pain material. But who said sharply played, tightly written R&B isn’t meaningful all on its own? Miguel, rather like Prince, is a weirdo with a surfeit of hooks and the chops to put them over. In an age of outsized R&B innovators, he’s our subtle auteur.

Cocktail-hour music with a progressive kick

This is cocktail-hour music with a non-trivial progressive kick – an interesting mixture. Cohen’s warm-sounding clarinet is supported throughout by the occasionally rambunctious pairing of Jason Lindner on piano and Daniel Freedman on drums. Their considered approach is established right away, on the opening one-two punch of songs. “Anat’s Dance” is a spirited original by Lindner that opens up just enough room for things to get wooly – though, just in case it was feeling too free for your taste, next up is a smooth rendition of “La Vie En Rose,” with Wycliffe Gordon on vocals, out of nowhere! (Gordon also gets his some trombone time during “And the World Weeps.”) An array of other world-music accents get their due in the mix – there’s a prepared-piano texture that crops up now and again in “All Brothers,” and the Brazilian romp “Um a Zero” has double-time abandon to spare – but not one threatens to overwhelm the comfort-food-style presentation.

In the popular telling, Boulez’s story is one in which he holds onto that title of enfant terrible a bit past the first fading of his youth. When Boulez tried to feed New Yorkers a steady diet of hardcore modernism, as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s, audiences — and the press — bristled throughout his tenure. (Headlines in the Times often ran like so: “It’s Fun for Boulez. But…” and “The Iceberg Conducteth.”)

What’s happened in the last 20 years, however, is a lowering of hostilities on all sides of the Boulez question. While the Frenchman’s skill as a conductor has long been much admired, so, increasingly, is his own demanding, almost religiously cacophonous early music, the challenges of which have been taken up by younger generations of conservatory grads. And though he’s painstakingly slow with his own pen, Boulez’s later compositions have admitted of a certain lyricism that he might have howled against as a young man. Perhaps when Boulez said “all art of the past must be destroyed,” he was predicting, without knowing it, his own penchant for rewriting and expanding his previous works. (For this reason, it’s even more desirable than usual to own multiple recordings of the “same” Boulez piece.)

The new line is that he’s calmed down a bit, and that he’s taken a turn toward his beloved Debussy. But those statements only track if you think Debussy is not intense on his own. Better then just to allow that Boulez has slowly built up a body of work worth exploring. Besides, there are even rumors that he’s writing — gasp! — an opera based on Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” to be premiered at La Scala in 2015. While the opera world waits, the rest of us have his recorded catalog of mysteries left to puzzle over — including, this year, the revelation that an old, brief piece has since been revised and extended to a length of over 50 minutes, the second-longest orchestral essay of the maestro’s career.

Pushing harder than ever

Mary Halvorson has kept busy since stepping out as a bandleader toward the end of 2000s. Quite aside from her active career as a guitar-slinging sidewoman (see Tomas Fujiawara’s recent albums), she has at least three working bands under her own name. And that doesn’t count her as-yet unrecorded supergroup with avant-jazz guitarist Marc Ribot, either.

There’s her power trio, which recorded Dragon’s Head — and vaulted her into the modern jazz front-guard — in 2008. Soon after, Halvorson expanded the group into a quintet, adding alto sax and trumpet, and used it to turn out the brilliant album Saturn Sings. More recently, the guitarist/composer has pumped her working band into a septet: though that’s not what we hear on this, the third disc of Halvorson-written compositions — all of which bear “opus”-like numbers, in a fashion reminiscent of her mentor, Anthony Braxton.

Bending Bridges is, mostly, her quintet at work once again, with a couple of moments for trio sprinkled in for effect. The composer has shown a penchant for starting albums off with a pensive gait — the better to dramatize the inevitable rise to a steaming boil — but “Sinks When She Rounds The Bend (No. 22)” is her most rueful kickoff tune yet. Halvorson, who solos throughout this album with less frequent recourse to her pitch-shifting pedals than normal — thereby showing off a more lustrous, natural tone than listeners may be accustomed — refrains from kicking off the full ensemble rock grind of the composition until the five-minute mark. And it’s a seven-minute tune.

So “deliberate” is the watchword here. Halvorson’s pieces are getting longer; only one track on Bridges clocks in at less than six minutes. Real listening-focus is required by a sinuous piece like “Love in Eight Colors (No. 21),” which pivots between two themes in its opening minute, then cuts to a (gorgeous) bridge for the band’s horns, before setting up a series of unaccompanied solos that are linked by intermittent group interplay.

Those initial themes don’t get taken up again until the very end of the song. While you might think writing that lovely is too good to be relegated to bookend status, each second of playing by this band — particularly Jon Irabagon’s alto and Jonathon Finlayson’s trumpet — more than justifies the patience required to take it all in. Even “That Old Sound (No. 27),” a reference perhaps to its being written for trio, doesn’t sound like anything on her debut. Halvorson may have given us more “immediate” records than this one, but Bending Bridges sees the leader pushing harder than ever in the search for compositional surprise.

A generational landmark

As the executive director of the New York City-based International Contemporary Ensemble — a group that often appears to be everywhere, commissioning new pieces by the likes of Steve Lehman while rescuing neglected operas by Hans Werner Henze — flutist Claire Chase has done as much as anyone to rehabilitate the reputation of European-informed modernism in the city that Pierre Boulez once scandalized with much the same aesthetic.

How has she done it? Part of the answer is that Chase and her ICE cohorts are just that talented; the breath control required by a piece like Kaija Saariaho’s titular work on this program isn’t just a technical issue, but an interpretive one. And Chase makes the timbral subtleties of avant-garde, extended technique really sing through this program, and soulfully.

Even though no electronics are involved on the album, it feels as though the legacy of abstracted, manipulated instrumental textures has inspired much of the playlist. Kaija Saariaho’s experimentations flow, after all, from Pierre Boulez’s early IRCAM explorations, and so it’s fitting that his early “Sonantina” is on the same program. Chase’s playful mastery with the piece is a generational landmark, in that the piece doesn’t feel played out of anything resembling duty (like either that of a monk to a religion, or a child to a plate of spinach). Hery playing comes off so joyfully, it almost makes you forget that you’re supposed to think this music is hard going.

A natural choice for Dinnerstein's gifts

One of the knocks against outta-left-field, Bach-loving piano phenom Simone Dinnerstein is that her take on the composer is too Romantic. Most people likely know how they come down on her Bach at this point – so what’s most interesting here is the inclusion of Schubert’s first series of Impromptus (which sit next to a couple of Bach Partitas). Those Schubert entries, written late in the life of a composer who sits more or less at the first blush of the Romantic era, do seem a natural choice for Dinnerstein’s gifts.

But if you thought she’d be looking to hedge or hide some of her interpretive tendencies in Romantic repertoire, you’d be wrong. From the opening of No. 1 in C Minor, she instantly features her instinctual, radical recourse to rubato. It’s a doubling down. At nearly 12 minutes, her take is well over a minute longer than standard-bearer recordings by Schiff and Perahia (not to mention last year’s entry from Paul Lewis). It’s a daring approach, and persuasive in no small measure due to the engineering on this recording: By catching the piano’s low end, it gives the enterprise a grounded sense even when Dinnerstein engages in her wait-for-it style of teasing. This isn’t a recording that overwhelms the historical competition in Schubert (what, you don’t have the Perahia? Get it!), but it is a bracing new way to hear those first Impromptus.

A three-movement work for sampling keyboard and pianos

Lisa Moore is one of modern music’s great interpreters; she’s always turning up on this or that program of brand new piano music in New York. So good for Cantaloupe, the record imprint of the Bang on a Can collective, for giving her the opportunity to put out EPs more or less at will. After her economical disc of compositions by Don Byron earlier in 2011 comes this program of new pieces by Downtown eminence Annie Gosfield. (Though Gosfield’s work has received consistent attention from John Zorn’s Tzadik label, it’s good to see her cropping up on other imprints.)

Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers, a three-movement work for sampling keyboard and pianos (both played by Moore), is a howler: jagged, buzzing electronics vie for your attention right from the drop, though the stately block chords of the acoustic piano are loathe to give up so easily. This battle between differing keyboard sonics stays gripping until its final seconds, before ending more or less in a high-BPM tie. But Gosfield’s writing isn’t looking to have either the piano or the sampling keyboard achieve primacy; the race, not the outcome, is the thing. Moore’s talents show no favoritism, either — she’s equally good whether plugged-in or acoustic — which serves the piece perfectly. After the audacity of “Slingers,” Gosfield’s short composition “Brooklyn, October 5, 1941″ (look it up in your baseball history books) feels slight by comparison, though it’s nice to have, too.

The most important entry in his strangely self-effacing but brilliant catalog

Calling it: Craig Taborn is the most mysterious figure in contemporary jazz. This is true even if you ignore his stylistic diversity, the ability he has to play with any bandleader and find a style that fits their project while remaining true to his own sound. (That could mean funking it up on Fender Rhodes for the Chris Potter Underground, or else deftly accompanying the chamber-like pieces on Okkyung Lee’s latest album for John Zorn’s Tzadik label.)

The underlying, and more frustrating puzzle, is why Taborn hasn’t played or recorded as a leader more often, especially since his solo piano sets have gradually acquired legendary status among jazz insiders. While Taborn has been in leader-less groups here and there, we haven’t heard his self-determined voice in some time — not since 2004′s Junk Magic. And while that album’s subtle IDM inflections qualify it as a minor masterpiece, it also declined to show much in the way of Taborn’s own considerable improv chops. For that reason, Avenging Angel — 70-plus minutes of Taborn by himself at a grand piano, with no electronics in sight — now stands as the most important entry in Taborn’s strangely self-effacing but brilliant catalog.

Though he doesn’t get too far “out there,” per the ECM label’s well-established aesthetic, Taborn does manage push a few boundaries. Witness how the purposeful modulations that move against a single note in opener “The Broad Day King” give way to an almost Debussy-like fluidity in “Glossolalia.” Rarely does such a hard left turn seem so gentle. And when Taborn — a prodigious keyboard abuser — finally does start in with the contrapuntal pounding (during the title track, among others), Avenging Angel emerges as a candidate for album of the year.

Making an intellectual case for Liszt's music

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth. We’re seeing a trove of new recordings: debuts from young recitalists, box sets of accounts from old heavies, reissues, remasters and all the rest. In short, it’s Lisztomania. And, oh-ho — here comes Pierre-Laurent Aimard with The Liszt Project, a two-disc set in which the soloist, Adelburgh Festival curator and all-around genius takes on a composer whose work he’s barely touched (on recordings at least).

So what does he mean by “project,” aside from, you know, performing some of the man’s music? First of all, it means playing Liszt just slightly more than he plays other composers. There’s more than an hour here of solo piano works by Wagner, Ravel, Scriabin, Berg and…uh, Olivier Messiaen. These are all great pieces. But the point of including them, it seems clear, is to rip Liszt away from the sentimental, show-offy hands of piano contest winners and make an intellectual case for this music. “[O]ne might often wish that he’d been a little more focused and had striven to impose a more rigorous sense of form on all this wealth of material,” Aimard says of Liszt in the liner notes. “One” might, you say! Left unspoken is the suggestion that if Liszt couldn’t manage to do this on his own, Aimard can impose that rigor on the music now.

The Sonata in B Minor suffers the most from Aimard’s over-determined intellectual impulses. While it’s striking to hear this famous and oft-recorded piece played with such monastic evenness — the big changes in soft/loud dynamics even feel perfectly controlled — the end effect is also a little bloodless. Messiaen’s music can seem Zen and profound when Aimard plays it this way, but it’s not always the best approach to apply to Liszt. (From this year’s batch of Liszt recordings, I prefer Nino Gvetadze’s B Minor Sonata, which comes complete with an edge and an ability to get carried away with itself.)

Aimard does better with the excerpts from the Years of Pilgrimage suites. Nor does the pianist’s technique on these pieces seem incongruous next to the inclusion of some of Messiaen’s birdsongs. The first half of the opening disc also throws listeners a bunch of killer curveballs. The transition from Lizst’s “Nuages gris” to Berg’s Piano Sonata makes sense and is well executed — it’s the tritones in both pieces that link them, in Aimard’s mind — but pales next to the fun of following a slow account of Liszt’s “Unstern!” with Scriabin’s “Black Mass” sonata. There are a lot of ideas to study and ponder on these two discs, and that’s surely how Aimard wanted it. If a few of the experiments turn out to feel overly academic, that’s fine. We’ll still have those 200 other flashy recordings of the B Minor Sonata, when we want that.