Notable CDs

As the late critic Harold C. Schonberg observed, people either get Anton Bruckner’s massive, patiently unfolding works or they don’t. The conductor Claudio Abbado obviously got them, so sensitively did he, in what turned out to be his final concert, put the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra through the Austrian composer’s demanding paces. Tellingly, Abbado chose the version of Symphony No. 9 that Bruckner died before finishing instead of an ersatz, posthumously “completed” one, thus evoking the bittersweetness with which no doubt many a great man draws his last breath.

La Oreja de Zurbarán

The latest strategy followed by this Medieval-Renaissance vocal ensemble and its conductor Paul Van Nevel: Namecheck a famous 17th-century Spanish painter of (mainly) religious subjects in the title, find eight (mainly) religious examples in Latin and Spanish of music that he would’ve likely heard and found inspiring, and record them in the a cappella, polyphonic style of their time. The result: a spiritually intense soundtrack to equally spiritually intense paintings that, thanks to the internet, you don’t have to visit museums to see.

Hymns of the Church

These shimmering, a cappella renditions of 17 selections from the John D. Martin–compiled Hymns of the Church (Benchmark Press, 2011) should not only spur sales of the hymnal but also rekindle among faithful hearts a love for reverential worship. “It is our intent,” read the liner notes, “that our music be a powerful reflection of God’s excellent beauty.” It is. It’s also a map by which those tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of worship-music doctrine can begin navigating their way back home.

Dances of the Dolls

Now all of 10, this Chinese piano prodigy began recording these 26 selections just before she turned 9. And whether it’s her precocious talent or the care with which her program was assembled, she flatters the compositions as much as they flatter her (plenty in both cases). That the seven-movement Shostakovich title suite and Poulenc’s Villageoises, Petites Piéces Infantines were intended to be played by children doesn’t even suggest itself, so brightly does Wang make them sparkle. And her Mozart, Liszt, and Chopin aren’t exactly dullsville either.

Spotlight

A more luminously gorgeous, restrainedly lush, conceptually imaginative, or fully realized blending of serious 20th-century music and jazz than Paris (Warner Classics) by the English trumpeter Alison Balsom and the equally English Guy Barker Orchestra you won’t easily find. “While this album is anything but a stereotype of a ‘Parisian’ sound,” writes Balsom in the liner notes, “every track has a link—be it direct or more tenuous—to the world of Paris.” And it’s that “world of Paris,” rather than the mere city itself, that Balsom evokes.

With two selections apiece from Satie and Ravel and three by Messiaen (the fifth movement of Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus), the serious compositions predominate. But the suggestively rich relief into which they’re cast by foils in the form of compositions by Django Reinhardt, Michel Legrand, Joseph Kosma, and Astor Piazzolla transforms them from exemplars of particular genres and times into signposts pointing toward something both more universal and more mysterious.