Notable CDs

The subtitle is “Improvisations and Compositions for Horn and Electronica,” so traditionalists can’t say they weren’t warned. Or, as the hornist Agrell writes in the booklet, “[C]lassical listeners are accustomed to hearing the horn in a fairly narrow range of traditional timbres and settings, so no doubt some ears may be unprepared to know what to make of some of these new settings.” Agrell’s not as cutting edge as he thinks. But think he does. And enough of the time he and his accompanying percussionists think enough.

Memories Lost

The orchestra and its conductor get second billing because, except for the tempest that they whip up in Xilin Wang’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 56, it’s the top-billed pianist Chen Sa who commands attention. Four of the six composers are Chinese (five if one counts Taiwan’s Hsiao Tyzen), and one is Turkish. Five are still alive. (Tyzen passed away in February.) So showcasing contemporary Asian music is Chen’s obvious intent—and making sure that none of its power and beauty gets lost in translation.

William Byrd for Guitar

No surprises here. But with a composer such as Byrd and a classical guitarist such as Estrem, why would you want any? Because Byrd was born before Shakespeare and died after him, it’s only somewhat fanciful to hear his compositions as the musical equivalents of the finest English-language sonnets ever written. As with Shakespeare’s every word, iamb, and rhyme, Byrd’s every note, tempo, and melody seem practically predestined to achieve its effect. And if Estrem wouldn’t exactly put things that way, you’d never know from his playing.

David Lang & Mac Wellman: The Difficulty of Crossing a Field

Because the Ambrose Bierce short story on which this musical-theater piece is based was almost certainly a lark, Bierce would not have approved of how seriously David Lang and Mac Wellman have taken it. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, however, whose short story “In a Grove” popularized the multiple-perspectives-equals-moral-ambiguity motif, might have. Bierce’s “plot”: A plantation owner vanishes into thin air, and the witnesses tell what they know, which isn’t much. Not quite much ado about nothing, but the something about which it’s about remains elusive.

Spotlight

The critic Harold C. Schonberg was correct to call minimalism “wallpaper music” with “less harmonic adventure than the three chords of Baroque music” and to mock the pretentiousness of its least-cultured defenders. But, had he lived five more years than he did and thus heard Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 10 (2008), it’s conceivable that he might have ameliorated his criticism. Although Glass’ trademark incremental-repetition-as-development is still on display, hearing it rendered by an orchestra instead of, say, by an art-rock ensemble like the sort that first brought Glass to light reveals a kind of grandeur.

Philip Glass: Symphony No. 10 (Orange Mountain Music) by Austria’s Bruckner Orchester Linz is a case in point. Under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies, the orchestra’s 100-plus members find nuances where others might only find patterns, method where others might find only madness. In short, they do not sound bored. And, consequently, they do not sound boring either.