Folk Songs of the World

Cathy Berberian, Harold Lester

That Berberian died in 1983 is just one reason to celebrate these recently released 1978 recordings. Another is that she was a daringly eclectic chamber-music singer capable of producing a unique and startling array of sounds. “She made,” to quote the liner notes, “no distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music.” She made no distinction between emotion and authenticity either. One needn’t speak any of the 16 languages in which she sings these 22 folk or folk-inspired songs to feel what they meant to her.

Viva Italia: Sacred Music in 17th Century Rome

Duke Vespers Ensemble

These 500-year-old melodies with Latin lyrics provide a perspective that’s especially welcome during politically chaotic times. Supported by the Mallarmé Chamber Players and the Washington Cornett & Sackbutt Ensemble, the vibrantly recorded 24-voice chamber choir that gets top billing reminds listeners that the eternal, not the ephemeral, is what really matters. Seventeenth-century Rome was Catholic, so many of the texts are too. And if the audience touched by their reverence for things sacred includes politicians, there may yet be hope for the beleaguered American electorate.

New York Rhapsody

Lang Lang

It’s hard to hear this Big Apple tribute, which relegates Lang Lang to a supporting role, as anything but Sony’s oblique concession to the Chinese pianist’s persistent inability to win over critics on his own. Displacing him in the spotlight are pop vocalists, a Lou Reed impersonator, a composer roster with “crossover” written all over it, and, on “Rhapsody in Blue,” a co-pianist (Herbie Hancock). Yet, although the album flirts with frivolity, it never bores. Lang should be neither surprised nor offended if listeners demand an encore.

A Journey

Pretty Yende

Pretty Yende is a South African operatic soprano who has been going from strength to strength for the last seven years, making this album, her debut, feel somewhat belated but hardly anticlimactic. Compare her performance of Delibes’ “Flower Duet” with the one that Anna Netrebko released in 2007, and you’ll be hard-pressed to distinguish the rookie from the veteran. A world-class level of vocal technique and dramatic intuition runs throughout the entire recording. Every generation needs a reason to discover opera. Yende fills this one’s bill.

Encore

If not the father of minimalism, the American composer Steve Reich was certainly its earliest popularizer, paving the way for the genre’s mainstream acceptance. Naysayers have long insisted that its emphasis on rhythm, repetition, and micro-incrementalism to the exclusion of melody amounts to little more than infantile iconoclasm. On the other hand, it may have alerted a generation to musical possibilities outside the pop-rock parameters. The jury remains out.

Reich turned 80 on Oct. 3. To mark the occasion, the ECM New Series label has repackaged his recordings of Music for 18 Musicians (1976), Octet/Music for a Large Ensemble/Violin Phase (1980), and Tehillim (1981) in a box titled The ECM Recordings. It’s with Tehillim that the skeptical but open-minded should begin. In it, one clearly can hear Reich’s techniques going somewhere. And, as the Hebrew texts that the vocalists sing come from Psalms 19, 34, 18, and 150, that somewhere is clearly worth getting to. —A.O.