Benjamin Britten’s song cycles are among his best and best-known works. Though some maintain that versions by Peter Pears, Britten’s artistic and domestic partner for most of his creative life, are “definitive,” that singer’s voice ...

Arvo Pärt’s music, both choral and instrumental, often uses religious texts for a starting point. How apt that the 75-year- old composer based his Symphony No. 4, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on the ...

Valery Gergiev, highly regarded for his passionate performances of Russian repertoire, Wagner, and Mahler, affirms his versatility with compelling interpretations of three Ravel staples. His Daphnis et Chloe— the entire ballet, complete with chorus—is voluble ...

Everything on this superbly played recital of modern music for clarinet and piano by four American composers is flavored, whether openly or more subliminally, by that most American musical invention, jazz. Gershwin’s catchy Three Preludes ...

Born in 1942, Swedish composer Sven- David Sandström first came to attention for his complex orchestral works. For 20 years, however, Sandström was a member of the Hägersten Motet Choir, near Stockholm. In that nurturing ...

Complete string quartets? Aren’t there just two? Not exactly. The Kreutzer Sonata and Intimate Letters quartets are both from Janácek’s last years, inspired by his intense romantic attachment to Kamila Stösslová, a much younger woman. ...

The American composer Henry Brant, who died in 2008 at the age of 94, is chiefly remembered for his highly original “spatial music.” Brant wrote more than 100 works in which the physical placement of ...

Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is often referred to as a “minimalist.” But there are different stripes of minimalism. Mompou’s is not of the rarified La Monte Young or hyperactive Philip Glass varieties, but rather in the ...

Lisbon-born Artur Pizarro grew up hearing this music by two masters of keyboard composition from the other side of the Iberian Peninsula. His performances breathe with the natural ease of long familiarity. The pianist’s lyrical ...

Howard Shore’s many high-profile film scores include most of David Cronenberg’s movies, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Aviator. His grandest achievement, however, is his music for The Lord of the Rings—this earned him ...

For his hour-long song cycle, Steven Mackey’s protagonist is a “lovelorn psychologist”; 200 years ago, this sensitive soul would have been a poet. He’s holed up in a seedy motel, remembering, grieving, and mentally unraveling. ...

Mark Waldrep, the founder and leader of AIX Records and iTrax, does like being first. In his interview with me, presented in TAS issue 218 ("Mark Waldrep Knows What He's Doing"), the guy bragged on ...

John Corigliano, an honored stalwart among American composers, has written for the piano throughout his career. Ursula Oppens, joined by Jerome Lowenthal for a couple of two-piano works, surveys 50 years of music that’s amazingly ...

Selling for the quite reasonable price of $120, this six-LP box gives collectors a chance—another chance, actually, as Classic Records and Speakers Corner have already waded into these waters—to sample the great Mercury Living Presence ...

This Sleeping Beauty, arguably the finest of Tchaikovsky’s ballets, was recorded in 1959 with Ernest Ansermet on the podium leading L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. These meticulously manufactured Speakers Corner LPs demonstrate well what Kenneth ...