A wonderful place to start for those unfamiliar with Carter's work

There are ghosts on this record. Of course, the gaping maw left by the recent death of Elliott Carter — just shy of his 104th birthday, mind you — still echoes. But there is another spectre here, that of Charles Rosen, not only one of Carter’s staunchest advocates and one of the world’s great writers whose topic happened to be classical music, but among our accomplished and special pianists. So it is unsurprising that the collaboration on Carter’s ferocious mid-’60s Piano Concerto is one for the books, and Bridge has done us excellent service by making this recording (a live recording, but still) available.

This record, this ninth volume in Bridge’s important Carter sequence, is a wonderful place to start for those who might be unfamiliar with — or scared of — Carter’s work. Spanning seven — seven! — decades of his work, this collection acts as an excellent toe-dip. There is a thorough sampling of his later, more high-modernist work for which he is best known, like the behemoth Piano Concerto (in good hands with not only Mr. Rosen but the Basel Sinfonietta under Joel Smirnoff) or the solo piano works Two Thoughts About the Piano and Tri-Tribute (sumptuously rendered by Steven Beck), not to mention or the delightfully twittering, moody, breathy and ferocious Nine by Five (excellently dispatched by the Slowind Wind Quintet), but these are not even the real gems of this de-facto retrospective. Here, alongside the more jagged offerings are a few gorgeous pieces penned by the younger man: the orchestral songs “Voyage” and “Warble for Lilac Time,” thrillingly performed by Tony Arnold and the Colorado College Festival Orchestra led by Scott Woo, show a deft way with harmony and a gorgeous sense of melody — a sense that never left him, just took a radically different turn — as does the positively downright lovely “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred,” a lilting turn for guitar and soprano (the sensitive David Starobin and Rosalind Rees).

The thrill of this record as a whole (if anyone listens that way) is that these earlier and later works do us the service of informing each other, creating context. But if a lesson is not what you seek, this disc can be listened to for the sheer glory of the sound — from the concerto’s delicious dissonances to the raw emotion of the earlier songs.

A reassuring and comforting text, played by a remarkable ensemble

First, I feel it’s important to say that, as of this writing, David Lang is nowhere near death. I see him walking through the neighborhood from time to time and he is his usual cheery, deadpan self. And yet the Bang on A Can co-founder has produced an incandescent string of pieces in recent years focused exclusively on death and dying. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion gravely watches a poor young girl freeze to death as passersby ignore her. His yet-to-be-recorded Love Fail takes an oblique look at the fatal love affair between Tristan and Isolde. His haunting, drifting Salle des Departs (recorded here under the title “Depart”) was written for a hospital morgue. And then there’s Death Speaks, a five-movement work which takes up most of this recording. Here, death is not an event, but a figure, like something out of an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. But unlike the American folk song “O Death,” in which Death is a scary, implacable foe — the singer asks, “oh Death, won’t you pass me over another year” — Lang has assembled a text in which Death is addressing us, with a message that is ultimately reassuring, and comforting.

The text is built around the many and varied instances in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the figure of Death speaks. The music, as in the other death-themed works named above, has a transparent texture that sets off and subtly colors those texts, and the voice delivering it. That voice belongs to Shara Worden, one of the current breed of musicians who move fluidly between the worlds of classical music and indie rock. While still leading her own band, My Brightest Diamond, Worden has become the go-to voice for the so-called “indie classical” crowd. The rest of the ensemble here is equally remarkable: Bryce Dessner, one of the twin electric guitarists from the popular rock band The National, and a fine composer himself; Owen Pallett, the violinist, vocalist and composer who formerly recorded as Final Fantasy; and Nico Muhly, the in-demand composer and keyboardist whose works range from choral to electronic. With essentially an all-star band, Lang has chosen to write music which is not conventionally virtuosic, relying instead of the quartet’s musicality and precision. The results are quietly stunning. Highlights include the gentle, chiming minimalism of part 1, “You Will Return”; the resonant percussive use of the piano’s bass end in part 2, “I Hear You”; the deft, rhythmic use of the violin in part 3, “Mist Is Rising”; and the lovely duet that blossoms in part 5, “I Am Walking.”

After Death Speaks, the album invites you to relax in the dark-hued but warm ambience of “Depart,” for chorus and strings. Probably best not to think too much of the French morgue for which it was written.

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.

A remarkable, heartfelt tribute to one of music's true outliers

In his performances as DJ/rupture, Jace Clayton has been part of that experimental breed of DJ/producers who draw on the sounds of the classical avant-garde. But while names like Edgard Varese, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen have become hip in DJ culture, Clayton has turned to one of music’s true outliers, the gay African-American composer Julius Eastman. (Both his sexual orientation and race figure prominently in his titles.) The Julius Eastman Memorial Depot is neither a mash-up nor a straight remix. It is a recasting and reimagining of two of Eastman’s most important and defining works, “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerrilla,” both originally for four pianos but arranged here for two pianos and live electronics. And it is a remarkable, heartfelt tribute to a man who was a fixture on the New York “downtown” scene in the ’70s and ’80s, performing with Meredith Monk and singing the lead role in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs For a Mad King before succumbing to alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness and death at the age of 49.

“Evil Nigger, Part 1″ is almost pretty, with the layered chiming of its minimalist pianos; Part 2 abruptly switches to a more obviously electronic sound; Part 3 takes on a darker, dramatic hue as the music descends to the bass end of the keyboards, heaving and rolling in waves of increasingly dense sound that almost sounds like a kind of broadband drone. The final part announces itself with the sounds of glitch electronica, while the piano textures thin out, creating a sense both of space and of expectation that something will soon come rushing in to fill it. Shards of gamelan-like piano, impossibly rapid trills and tolling chords hover around the edges of the mix, until a brief explosion of massive piano sounds takes over. It ends as ambiguously as one of Bela Bartok’s nachtmusik (“night music”) pieces, with the half-remembered echoes of those earlier trills in a haunted electroacoustic haze.

“Gay Guerrilla,” in five parts, begins with the steady pulse of the pianos; Clayton’s electronics are subtle but telling, often hard to distinguish from the pianos themselves. In Part 2, a web of shifting electronic drones grows out of the patter of almost bell-like tones in the upper registers of the keyboards. When the pianos return, in a gently galloping rhythm, the result is perhaps the most conventionally beautiful music here. “Conventionally” being a relative term, of course. Part 3 begins to build up rhythmic counterpoint that sounds reminiscent of Steve Reich’s work, but no sooner does that happen then the sound of a turntable dying brings the music to a grinding halt — at which point we hear Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” (This appropriation appears in Eastman’s original version of the piece.) Echoes of that tune flit through the thick piano textures of Part 4; and Part 5, with its endlessly ascending pianos, has a more reflective, even valedictory cast.

The album concludes with a Jace Clayton original, a short song that takes the wry humor of Eastman’s own work and turns it on the usual “equal-opportunity employment” speech, turning it into a pensive contemplation of a man who was driven to despair in part by a lack of employment opportunities.

Continuing along the Silk Road with perhaps his biggest project yet

Cellist Yo Yo Ma’s musical adventures along the Silk Road continue with perhaps his biggest project yet: an album with his Silk Road Ensemble, made huge by the addition of a little band called The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Since beginning this extraordinarily productive series of concerts, recordings and educational programs in 2000, Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project have traced the lineage of the Western classical tradition back through the trade routes that brought people, instruments, and techniques from Central Asia into Europe, usually through Venice, during the so-called Age of Exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries. This has meant putting the violin, cello, flute, and other orchestral instruments in close contact with their musical cousins — fiddles from Iran, lutes from Uzbekistan, zithers from China. The addition of a full-on Western orchestra, especially one with the powerful collective voice of the Chicago Symphony, could easily have overwhelmed the chemistry that has developed within the Silk Road Ensemble. Happily, that has not been the case. The orchestrations here are usually restrained but telling, rising to a grand climax only on the rare occasions where the music specifically calls for it. And Osvaldo Golijov definitely calls for it in his piece “Night of the Flying Horses,” which ends with a heaven-storming gallop that is definitely a high point on the album.

The famous Chinese piece “Ambush From Ten Sides” is one of the most popular works in the repertoire of the pipa, the Chinese lute; but here, it is augmented by sheng (a handheld mouth organ), guitar, cello, and orchestra. The original is a marvel of musical economy — a single, ancient instrument is somehow able to graphically depict a famous battle from Chinese history right down to the flight of the arrows and the retreating hooves of the horses. But sometimes you don’t want to economize; the piece here becomes something very close to a film score, where you don’t really need to see the film.

The album starts well, too, with the “Arabian Waltz” by the Lebanese-born, German-based oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil. The grand sweep of the orchestra and the exotic tinge of Abou-Khalil’s Near Eastern and flamenco-steeped melody offer a winning combination of familiar sonic territory with unexpected tonal and instrumental colors. Another high point is “The Silent City,” a collaboration between Ljova (real name Lev Zhurbin), the Russian-American violist and composer, and Kayhan Kalhor, generally considered to be Iran’s premiere player of the kemanche, the traditional fiddle. It is one of a series of works these two have done, separately and together, with the string section of the Silk Road Ensemble, which has spun off to record its own musical journeys under the name Brooklyn Rider. And so Yo Yo Ma’s globetrotting Eurasian musical project ends up having strong ties to the New World as well.

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.

There's no rule against substantial music sounding beautiful

Never mind the “music of the spheres” album concept: These 18 melodic, gently pulsing tracks could find a receptive audience in the easy-listening (excuse me, “chillout”) market. But that doesn’t mean classical buffs should pass it up; there’s no rule against substantial music sounding beautiful, and everything here is beautiful while exhibiting a fair amount of variety and even imagination. The opening track, Baroque composer Johann Paul von Westhoff’s “Imitazione delle campane” (No. 3 of his solo violin sonatas, a short one-movement work arranged for violin and string orchestra by Christian Badzura), is a little surprising for how its restlessness sounds quintessentially modern. Most of the pieces are by living composers (the rest are arranged by modern composers), with many premieres, including Gabriel Prokofiev’s title track, hewing gently towards dissonance.

The performances are mostly for violin and piano; pianist Jacques Ammon never has anything technically challenging to play, so what matters is tone and dynamic control, and his playing is beautiful in those regards. But the textures and forces expand to include violin, string orchestra and chorus (the German Chamber Orchestra of Berlin and members of the Berlin Radio Choir are conducted by Simon Halsey), plus various combinations of violin, strings, and additional featured instruments, which also keeps things from blurring together. Hope is featured on every track, and his sound is wonderfully lustrous.

Stark beauty from a Julliard-trained classical pianist and an Americana singer-songwriter

Self-taught Americana singer-songwriter Tift Merritt and Julliard-trained classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein would hardly seem likely collaborators, but the rapport and cross-hatching of styles they achieve on Night sure makes it seem like they were destined to work together. The pair met in 2008 when they were brought together for an interview and they discovered mutual interests and approaches to performance. The music on Night was put together for a song cycle commissioned by Duke University and debuted in January 2011. The album’s stark beauty and seamless flow owes part of its success to the decision of Merritt and Dinnerstein to keep the work modest in scale and free of conceptual baggage.

There’s a feel to the collection that harkens back to the sheet music era, when folks entertained themselves in their parlor room and playing songs rather than listening to records or the radio. Together they make transitions between some of Merritt’s most translucent balladry: Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” Bach’s “Prelude in B minor” and Johnny Nash’s indelible “I Can See Clearly Now” seem not only effortless, but also logical. When Merritt, who’s busted through her gauzy Emmylou Harris model with a more forceful, grainy delivery, sings classical pieces like Henry Purcell’s ubiquitous “Dido’s Lament” or Schubert’s “Night and Dreams,” she doesn’t overreach; she shapes the words exquisitely in her natural North Carolina twang, while Dinnerstein plays with typical refinement, balancing simpatico accompaniment with virtuosity.

Some songs were written specifically for the project, including one by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (“I Shall Weep at Night”) and another by folk-pop singer Patty Griffin (“Night”), while the composer (and eMusic contributor) Daniel Felsenfeld elaborated on the melody of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” for “The Cohen Variations,” his instrumental feature for Dinnerstein. Merritt tackles “Wayfaring Stranger” with just voice and acoustic guitar and when Dinnerstein plays sparse figures by plucking the piano strings directly on the traditional song “I Will Give My Love an Apple,” a single, recurring note bleeds directly into “Colors,” the Merritt original that follows, quietly reinforcing the organic flow from one to song to the next. Lots of lip service is paid to musicians who bridge stylistic gaps, but on Night Merritt and Dinnerstein make genre irrelevant.

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.

Adding to her catalog of fine dance-inspired works

English composer Jocelyn Pook is best-known for her many film scores, including most of the key scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s last movie, Eyes Wide Shut. But her finest works have been inspired by dance, including 1999′s Flood, and now this score to Desh. Desh is a solo piece by the great British choreographer/dancer Akram Khan (“as transporting a piece of dance as I have ever seen,” according to the review in London’s Telegraph newspaper), and is based on the idea of connecting with the land of Khan’s family — Bangladesh. Pook traveled to the bustling capital city of Dhaka to record the sounds of the land and its people (and its weather), and these become as integral to the fabric of the score as the strings, drums, electronics and voices. Those voices, as in several of Pook’s other concert works, often deliver sacred texts from various religious traditions: The opening “Hallelujah” stresses the commonalities between the Abrahamic religions. “Metallic Sonata,” a highpoint in the score, begins with the raucous sounds of the Dhaka streets — the traffic, the street vendors, etc. — and adds thumping percussion; about halfway through, though, the Western sounds of the strings begin to change the meaning, if not the sound, of the piece.

“Honey Bee Story” is essentially a Minimalist chamber music work, reminiscent of Philip Glass’s more lyrical moments. “Remembering Noor,” on the other hand, revels in the sounds of South Asian folk rhythms and instruments; insistent and strangely catchy, it is a convincing collision of the organic and the processed, of Eastern sources and a Western composer with a keen ear. Guest singer Natacha Atlas and Pook’s longtime collaborator Melanie Pappenheim blend their voices to great effect on “Ave Maria,” which manages to evoke both the famous Schubert song of that name and Pook’s own “Oppenheimer,” an earlier work that also had an Arab-tinged melancholy to it.

A finely crafted effusion of Romanticism

Contrary to the impression music historians give, when Brahms and Bruckner were in their primes, there was at least one other German symphonist worth hearing. Joachim Raff (1822-82) may not have reach their exalted level, but he was praised in his youth by Mendelssohn and Schumann, was orchestration assistant to Liszt, taught Richard Strauss’s teacher, and anticipated Sibelius.

His somewhat unusually structured four-movement Symphony No. 2, from 1866, is a finely crafted effusion of Romanticism. At 33:41, Järvi gives a generally more vigorous performance than others but grants the opening movement a bit more gravitas than usual. Järvi’s also at the helm of a superior orchestra to either of theirs and is recorded better, making clearer the subtle brilliance of Raff’s orchestration. The Shakespeare Preludes (1879) are colorful tone poems; The Tempest and Macbeth mirror the play plots, while Romeo and Juliet and Othello capture overall ambiance. All four feature quicksilver mood shifts; Othello, with its tritone contrast of D major and A-flat major, is especially striking.

So compelling that it's easy to hear why Dudamel is the newest superstar conductor

Been wondering whether the hotshot young Venezuelan conductor lives up to the hype? Wonder no more, for to be this distinctive in warhorse repertoire, mostly without resorting to willful exaggerations, is impressive. There’s a languorous fervor in this caught-in-concert reading that recalls Bernstein. Clocking in at two seconds over 86 minutes, it’s generally on the slow side, but there have been slower renditions (Horenstein and Bernstein topped 89 minutes, Giulini 88, Zander 87), and the close of the third movement is extremely sprightly. The L.A. Phil, if not as tonally distinctive as the Vienna Phil, plays with enough richness and precision to more than withstand the scrutiny Dudamel’s attention to detail brings. His only misstep comes near the end of the finale; starting around 21 minutes in, it becomes so slow that the flow is interrupted, making his italicizing emphases seem self-conscious. Also, the ending is so quiet that it’s almost not there, though that was probably less of a problem in the concert hall. Otherwise, this reading is so compelling that it’s easy to hear why the 32-year-old is the newest superstar conductor.

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.

The mightiest cornerstone of the new symphonic repertoire

Aside from being an expertly recorded collection of imaginative and engrossing music, this collection of Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s four symphonies, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen (some of which are re-issues of long-out-of-print recordings, some of which are fresh takes) doubles as an extended musical essay on the dissolution of the symphony from the pen of one of the century’s more important and rangy composers. From the jauntiness of the traditional multi-movement First to the severe and occasionally retrogressive Fourth, these pieces stand as the mightiest cornerstone of the new symphonic repertoire.

Salonen has long been associated with this composer’s work, as the commissioned fanfare “bonus track,” tucked into the end of the set, attests. But it is in the Second Symphony that he cuts deepest, expertly balancing a barbaric yawp of a piece, split in two movements (bearing the poetic subtitles “hesitant” and “direct”) that effectively and achingly straddles the Big Philosophical divide between the “old” and the “new.” Most trying for this complex music is the pacing of it, knowing when to make it roar and when to whisper, because this is music whose beauty rests in its latent explosiveness.

This is by no means to cast shade on his reading of the single-movement Third Symphony, which will probably go forth as the “industry standard” performance. Salonen, leading the always-astonishing Los Angeles Philharmonic is the perfect ear and stick for the job. It is fitting that these discs are released now, days after what would have been Lutoslawski’s 100th birthday. These anniversaries allow for a moment of pause on the importance of the celebrated composer, but they are also excellent marketing pegs, giving companies a compelling reason to steward these kinds of treasure troves.

There is magic in these notes

French composer Henri Dutillieux might be the last of a certain kind of great composer: Using devices that might, in lesser hands, be corny — the march rhythms, washy strings, and big climax of the “de vincent a theo” movement of the eponymous piece, for example — he spins unapologetically expansive, golden narratives. On the spare opening of “memoire des ombres,” the music of the composer’s obvious predecessors (Debussy by way of Ravel) is both paid homage and made his own, to say nothing of the timbral delights that await in the “miroir” movement of the cello concerto Tout un monde lointain.

The real gem on the disc, however, is the orchestral masterwork The Shadows of Time — glee, terror, transcendence, and quiet beauty await. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (himself a student of Mr. Dutillieux) is in complete agreement with the works, refusing to resort to flash. As soloists, soprano Barbara Hannigan and cellist Anssi Karturen do more than hold their own, and, under Salonen especially, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France is perfect for the part. There is magic in these notes.

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.

A highly expressive interpretation

It’s not easy to make a new Brahms Violin Concerto recording stand out amid the dozens of competitors, but Batiashvili succeeds here. For one, she plays the rarely heard cadenza by Ferruccio Busoni, and she has juxtaposed the Brahms with the even more rarely heard Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 by the great (but unconsummated) love of Brahms’s life, Clara Schumann.

The performance of the Brahms is excellent, technically flawless but with enough tempo adjustments to satisfy even the tempestuous composer, making for a highly expressive, Romantic-with-a-capital-R interpretation even as she and Thielemann come in on the quicker end of the spectrum in the slow movement (while avoiding the extremes of Heifetz).

As for Busoni’s cadenza, there’s a reason it’s rarely heard. Its modernism is mildly shocking though hardly scandalous. The opportunity to hear the Schumann pieces played by a violinist of Batiashvili’s class is more of an attraction. Accompanied by pianist Alice Sara Ott, Batiashvili imbues it with all the emotion bestowed on the Brahms, and more, making it clear that these nearly forgotten miniatures are little masterpieces. There’s enough pent-up emotion flowing through these pieces to easily contradict the received image of Clara the primly stern professional widow, and to make this a must-own for violin fans.

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.

Thrilling music from twin poles of a longstanding musical schism

There was a time when the appearance of music by John Corigliano and Elliott Carter on the same record might have raised eyebrows: In the world of concert music, these two respected composers stood as twin poles of a long-standing musical schism. Time passes, things change, gardes get recast, and, as this record demonstrates, there is plenty to admire, respect, thrill to and even love in both pieces. Corigliano’s epoch-making (and this is not hyperbole; this piece changed things) is a dynamic and forceful exercise in raw orchestral sound, with three movements rich in variety and mood: the playfulness of “Cadenzas”; the sheer gorgeousness “Elegy”; and the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink closing of Antiphonal Tocatta.” By way of both contrast and concomitance, Carter’s taut single movement struts and frets, plinks and plunks in a well-paced way, giving both the performers and the listener more than enough to ponder, to hear, to adore. Eddy Vanoosthuyse’s nuanced performances of both demanding works is well matched and given appropriate space to breathe by Paul Meyer and the spot-on Brussels Philharmonic.

Blurring the distinction between poetry, music and the amorphous catchall term "sound art"

Vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara’s collaboration with the poet Kenneth Goldsmith blurs the distinction between poetry, music and the amorphous catchall term “sound art.” It was inspired by (and dedicated to) the late John Cage, whose own performances of his idiosyncratic writings were similarly hard to define. Everything about 73 Poems asks you to question some pretty basic assumptions: What is a song? What is a poem? How many is 73? (There are 79 tracks here.) Even the line between abstract art and the concrete is blurry here — Goldsmith’s texts use words, but sometimes more for their sound, and often more for their appearance, than their meaning. And the sounds, while based in recognizable words (and numbers), become a kind of aural abstraction, a “wall of sound” quite different from Phil Spector’s famous use of that phrase.

La Barbara’s overdubbed vocals — guttural overtone effects, swooping glissandi, whispers, etc. — draw a lot of their structure from the way the poems look on the page. Black text appears with a shadowy grey text underneath — usually the grey text is an “echo” of the preceding poem. This suggests an analogy to tape or digital delay effects in music, and that is how La Barbara treats it. Towards the middle of the piece (the poems in the 40s), the text devolves into a series of O’s and 0′s — typographically close but musically represented by completely different sounds.

Each poem is brief, and many of these tracks are under 30 seconds. Given the large number, it makes sense to just download the whole album, since that is how the project is meant to be heard. But if you want to get a taste for the piece, start with tracks 44 and 45, and you can go here to see the poems and more complete notes on the piece.