Recording of the Month

The first time I heard J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, I heard an endless sameness, lovely but undifferentiated. Only over many hearings did each pairing of prelude and fugue begin to emerge from the background, as what Bach did in each iteration of the same received form began to be revealed as an inexhaustible richness of difference. Gradually, I was learning Bach's musical language; only then did I begin to get an idea of what he might be saying.

These live performances of Beethoven's nine symphonies were recorded mostly in Tokyo's Suntory Hall, October through December 2012 (except 3 and 6, recorded in Munich's Herkulessaal); the ancillary material—the Reflections of this set's title—are works by contemporary composers commissioned by conductor Mariss Jansons and recorded in Munich and Tokyo in 2008, 2009, and 2012. Intended as homages to Beethoven (as if he needed any), they are supposed to reflect what these composers feel Beethoven might be writing if he were alive today. Each new work is meant to denote an aspect of a specific symphony, and the CDs are (mostly) arranged so that we can hear each after the symphony that inspired it. Some of these pieces are daring and innovative, and add value to these marvelous performances of the symphonies themselves.

In the new millennium, no country other than Cuba has exported more important jazz musicians to the United States than has Israel. But even though the Israeli jazz phenomenon has been much discussed in the jazz press, critics have been late to recognize that Avishai Cohen is one of the best trumpet players alive. Cohen has two siblings who also play jazz, and his charismatic older sister, Anat, who has been winning major jazz polls on clarinet for several years, gets most of the attention in the family. And then there is Avishai's name problem: One of the best-known Israeli jazz musicians, a bassist of the same name, got to New York first.

"See her how she flies . . ." When I first heard that lyric, from Jim Webb's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," sung by a hauntingly fragile woman's voice and supported by a sparse yet lyrical piano accompaniment, at an audio show in 1983, I got chills. Who was this empathetic singer? Back in my cabaret-musician days, more than four decades ago, I backed so many singers with beautiful-sounding pipes but who didn't seem to comprehend the meaning of the words—yet this unknown woman directly communicated the song's emotion.

If an orchestra is going to wait more than a decade before releasing its first record, it had better go big when it finally does—which is what the String Orchestra of Brooklyn has done. Afterimage includes compositions by Paganini (1782–1840) and Pergolesi (1710–1736) alongside works by Rome Prize winner Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) and the less well-known Jacob Cooper (b. 1980).

Starting with her out-of-nowhere triumph at the 2010 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition and continuing with the release of four albums including three Grammy winners, Cécile McLorin Salvant, still just 32, has been raising eyebrows and neck hairs for a dozen years. She reigns as the supreme jazz singer of our time, ranking among the best of all time. More remarkable, she keeps getting better, and, rarer still, she keeps evolving, expanding her repertoire of styles—which was vast from the start—without losing a wisp of her deep blues, swing, precision, wit, operatic range, or storytelling drama.