Music and Recording Features

It's not just the gray hairs or the expanding waistline that suggest one is getting old: it's also when the albums you love so much, and so vividly remember hearing for the first time, have become a part of the rock heritage industry. So it is with London Calling by the Clash, which celebrates its 40th birthday in December 2019.

“Musical scavenger” Bryce Dessner, the composer/musician who gained fame as principal songwriter of American rock band The National, describes his process as collecting sounds that appeal to him and trying them out. Classically trained, he’s one of a growing number of artists whose cross-genre music, when performed by string quartets, orchestras, and ensembles, has been central to broadening the definition of classical music in the 21st century. Dessner is also one of eight “extraordinary artists, thinkers and doers” appointed to a collective that will help steer conductor/composer Esa-Pekka Salonen when he succeeds Michael Tilson Thomas as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony in September.

Following in the lineage of such iconic dub music masters as Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock and Lee "Scratch" Perry, producer Adrian Sherwood is the UK's contemporary pioneer of dub: the reverb-filled, beats-rattling, bass-thick music that erupted from "sound system" parties in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1960s.

As the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven approaches, artists worldwide have begun issuing complete recordings of his oeuvre. At the top of a fast-growing list, three stand out: Andris Nelsons' recording of Beethoven's nine symphonies with the Wiener Philarmoniker (Decca), Igor Levit's issue of Beethoven's Complete Piano Sonatas (Sony), and the subject of this review, the Miró Quartet's 8-CD set of Beethoven's Complete String Quartets (Pentatone PTC5186827).

Romantics rejoice! In an age where ice seems to melt faster than hearts, there are still great musicians who uphold the Russian tradition of romantic music. Vadim Gluzman, Johannes Moser, and Yevgeny Sudbin may not (yet) have the cachet of David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Sviatoslav Richter, who famously came together with Herbert von Karajan to record Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, but their new SACD of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50, and Arno Babajanian’s sole Piano Trio (BIS-2372) places them firmly in the grand Russian tradition of emotive, give-it-all-you’ve-got musicianship.

A divine amalgam of joy and solemnity and one of Mozart’s most spiritually elevated creations, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) brings each generation's finest conductors and singers to the microphone. Now, Metropolitan Opera conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and tenor-cum-baritone Rolando Villazón and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe add to their series of Mozart recordings for Deutsche Grammophon with a star-studded version that includes some of the best young and veteran artists of our time.

I expect every lover of jazz and classical music will want to check out Decca’s new recording of jazz great Wynton Marsalis’ thoroughly engaging Violin Concerto and Fiddle Dance Suite.