5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

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Detroit Symphony Orchestra; Jader Bignamini, conductor (Pentatone)

I love when a new recording changes my mind. Previously, I had considered Wynton Marsalis’s Second Symphony (2009), known as the “Blues Symphony,” to be the least persuasive of his orchestral works. In 2019, he suggested that he felt similarly in an interview, saying, “It wasn’t played a lot, justifiably.” A revised version of the symphony was released by Blue Engine Records in 2021, but I found that to be tough listening. The first movement’s bevy of string motifs wasn’t exultant. Instead, it all sounded labored — offering an aesthetic that stopped well short of the finesse required by the blues tradition.

Enter the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. This is a group with a history of investigating serious jazz-classical crossover, as in its 1992 recording of Ron Collier’s orchestration of a suite based on Duke Ellington’s “The River.” Their new rendition of the “Blues Symphony” is just what the piece needed. Winds, strings and percussion all hit their marks with confidence during the first movement. And the conductor, Jader Bignamini, keeps things sprightly; when the movement’s climax wants extra dynamic punch, his players still have something to give. That high level of execution is evident throughout this performance of the hourlong work. Now, to my ear, the piece sits more comfortably alongside Marsalis’s most engaging classical efforts. SETH COLTER WALLS

Pedja Muzijevic, piano (Bright Shiny Things)

Gregory Spears’s beguiling new solo piano work began life in fall 2021, as an app produced by 92NY. Users could hear one piece for each part of the day (morning, afternoon, evening) for an entire week. Now available in Pedja Muzijevic’s scrupulous and thoughtful recording, the piece can be experienced either day by day or as a self-standing, 21-movement cycle.

I tried both and found different things to marvel at in this openly expressive music. Spreading the experience over a week allows the music to structure the day, harking back, as Spears notes, to the liturgical tradition of singing the hours, such as Vespers and Lauds. There is some wonderful tone painting: the first rustling of dawn in “Monday Morning” and rays of light streaming through the windows in “Tuesday Afternoon.” The ticktock rhythm of “Friday Afternoon” must seem familiar to anyone who has felt impatient for the end of the workweek.

Hearing “Seven Days” all at once, though, makes it easier to appreciate its purely musical virtues, such as the subtlety with which Spears leavens his brightly tonal language with dissonance, and shifts rhythmic energy. When the ghostly sounds of “Sunday Evening” drift into silence, they seem to lead, ineluctably, to the middle C that begins the piece all over again — as naturally, you might say, as day follows night. DAVID WEININGER

Bertrand Chamayou, piano (Erato)

In this sequel to his luminous 2015 recording of Ravel’s complete works for solo piano Bertrand Chamayou offers a fascinating collection of transcriptions — among them an orgiastically turbulent rendition of “La Valse” — and homages by composers Ravel had known or inspired.

The enigmatic sensuality of Ravel’s music, which can tip over into Surrealism at the drop of a hat, made it a touch point for composers of different styles. Ravel’s Spanish roots are honored in a delightfully dandyish homage by Arthur Honegger as well as in Joaquín Nin’s darkly charismatic “Mensaje a Ravel.” Quotations from Ravel filter into the spidery soundscapes of Salvatore Sciarrino’s “De la Nuit,” Frédéric Durieux’s obsessive “Pour Tous Ceux Qui Tombent” and Betsy Jolas’s pellucid “Signets.” Rendered with deft clarity and translucent sound by Chamayou, these miniatures form something akin to a stream of consciousness through 20th-century music. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

Rosa Feola, soprano; Cappella Neapolitana; Antonio Florio, conductor (Pentatone)

Rosa Feola, a soprano with a thoroughly lovely, modestly sized lyric voice, makes a less than obvious choice for her debut solo album. Instead of a showy collection of well-known, mellifluous arias, she has chosen to honor her Southern Italian countryman Niccolò Piccinni, a contemporary of Mozart and Gluck remembered today, if at all, for his Neapolitan comic operas.

This program doesn’t exactly know what it wants to be. Yes, it’s an appreciative survey of a once-popular composer who wrote dozens of stage works across serious and comic styles in a tenderly expressive vein. But with its focus on Piccinni’s wife, the soprano Vincenza Sibilla, it also dabbles in the kind of historical portraiture that was popularized by Cecilia Bartoli, and it leaves out a major work like “La Buona Figliuola.”

Feola’s voice flatters Piccinni with gentle inflections and a plump, rosy timbre. She carries phrases aloft as if on a caressing breeze, and her light touch suits his refined sentiment. But does he flatter her? She doesn’t necessarily come alive in his florid music, and her capacity for intense lyric drama, like Verdi’s “La Traviata,” remains underutilized.

The album intersperses arias with instrumental pieces that give the conductor Antonio Florio and the Cappella Neapolitana an opportunity to demonstrate a genial command of period style. It’s the first in a planned trilogy about Neapolitan music for these artists. Hopefully subsequent entries fill out a picture of Feola as well. OUSSAMA ZAHR

Yale Theater Orchestra, James Sinclair and Andre Kostelanetz, conductors (Sony)

The 150th anniversary of Charles Ives’s birth passed with notably little mainstream fanfare last fall. But at the end of the year, the conductor James Sinclair’s deep history with Ives — including his editing of performance editions — received another look, thanks to the first CD issue of the 1974 LP “Old Songs Deranged (Music for Theater Orchestra).” That disc was initially only available as part of a boxed set; now, it is streaming on its own. And it’s a revelation, a briskly paced hit parade of Ivesian wit, melody and experimental brio.

This album marshals the scrappy, pickup-band energy that Ives took advantage of in his own era to hear his music performed. Appropriately, you can discern brief flecks of saucy saxophone peeking out from underneath the heaps of tune-quotation and percussive tumult that dominate the opening “Country Band March,” which later figured into “Three Places in New England.” It’s a punchy, peculiar American sound, lovingly realized (in the main) by Sinclair and young players from Yale University.

The performers do justice to the beauty of Ives’s language in instrumental arrangements of some well-known songs (including “Charlie Rutlage” and “Songs My Mother Taught Me”), but they also transmit the power of his experimentalism. The mix of dense orchestral dread and ragtime-influenced piano that he packed into a satirical critique of yellow journalism — “Gyp the Blood or Hearst? Which Is Worst?” — carries enviable edge. In all, this is pure manna for devotees of Ives who may otherwise have felt wounded by his neglect last year. SETH COLTER WALLS

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