Notable CDs

Steve Reich’s own 1978 recording of this composition is where many people fell either in love or in hate with minimalism. Haters will have no use for this impressively precise recreation. Lovers, enamored of repetition as by definition they are, will enjoy it as much as they enjoy the original. They’ll also wonder whether the versions significantly differ. Caveat: If they’re curious enough to rig two devices and play both versions simultaneously, they run the risk of never wanting to hear the piece in any other way again.

Schumann Piano Concerto/Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2

These Lucerne Festival recordings are truly special. Annie Fischer’s performance of Schumann’s Piano Concerto dates from 1960, when she was in her mid-40s. Leon Fleisher’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 dates from 1962, when he was in his mid-30s and just shy of losing his ability to play with his right hand. The carpe-diem urgency that pervades the alternating delicacy and grandeur of their playing could almost make one believe that they somehow suspected they would never grace the Lucerne Festival stage again.

Masters Of The Roll

Arthur Friedheim died in 1932, leaving little behind in the way of audio. Of these 14 piano-roll recordings first made available by Dal Segno Records and now reissued by Blue Pie, 10 are given over to Liszt (with whom Friedheim studied), one apiece to the 19th-century German composer-pianist Adolf Henselt and the 19th-century American composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and two to Chopin. Francis of Assisi inspired two of Friedheim’s Liszt selections. And even in these semi-ersatz renditions, their inspirational properties endure.

Shades of Sound: Chamber Music for Flute and Piano

On her last album, the flutist Lisa Garner Santa focused on 19th- and 20th-century works by mostly well-known French composers. This time she focuses on 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century works by relatively obscure composers from the United States, Italy, England, and Czechoslovakia. Bohuslav Martinů’s First Sonata for Flute and Piano comes the closest to elucidating Santa’s stated intention of “explor[ing] the internal aspects of shade and light through … sound.” But a lyrical empathy between Santa and the pianist Nataliya Sukhina is evident throughout.

Spotlight

The late Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache was apparently not among the Shostakovich enthusiasts who discount the Russian composer’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9 in E flat Major, Op. 70/Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 (Weitblick) presents live, Celibidache-conducted performances by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1964 and 1967 respectively. At the height of the Cold War, Celibidache can be heard fanning flames.

Some background: Shostakovich composed the self-consciously anti-modern No. 5 in 1937 to placate Stalin, who had officially denounced him the year before. He composed the uncharacteristically lighthearted No. 9 in 1945, and Stalin denounced him again. The symphonies therefore illuminate the narrowness of the Soviet Union. They also sound surprisingly uninhibited compared to many contemporary pieces, a phenomenon illuminating the disquieting possibility that many “free” composers have spent the last 60-plus years imposing a greater narrowness upon themselves than any dictator ever would. —A.O.