Recording of the Month

From Afar seems on its face like a dream recording for audiophiles and music lovers. The 2-CD, 44-track project spotlights Víkingur Ólafsson, the sensitive, 38-year-old Icelandic pianist, performing a captivating program of short pieces twice on dissimilar pianos with very different sound: a concert grand and an upright. The very different performances are dictated by Ólafsson's response to these very different instruments. The contrasts are wondrous.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was one of the first albums I ever purchased. A week before, an uncle had given me his old red Dansette record player; I used collected pocket money to christen it. After just one play, the 10-year-old me was blown away. But it wasn't just elementary school kids who loved this album, causing it to break into the top 30 US and UK album charts. This was the album that launched Bowie to superstardom.

When your uncle is an award-winning producer and engineer, a band formed by you and your cousins has a higher-than-average shot at going somewhere. But even that family advantage can't explain the immediate success of the Los Angeles–based Linda Lindas; they've earned their accolades through talent, hard work, and ingenuity. Their first album, Growing Up, offers proof of their worth and the promise of a stellar musical future.

You might think an artist with 22 Top-40 hits would identify his winning formula and stick with it. Instead, John Mellencamp's long career has been a tale of determined development and often improvement. On his latest album, the 70-year-old Indiana native has nestled deeper into his rural Midwestern roots, eschewing rock defiance for folk philosophy. The result is a powerful baring of the soul, which, to many Americans, will also be a glance in the mirror.

Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy—the latter is a stage name for Will Oldham—did not set out to make an album together. They were just trying fill the long pandemic months with music. In 2020, they started singing other people's songs together, broadcasting them to fans via Zoom. They recorded the tracks, choosing a different guest musician to contribute to each song. Eventually they amassed recordings of enough covers, plus reimaginings of some original works, to create this album for Drag City, where they're both signed artists. It's an endlessly interesting and clever project, full of musical exploration. Some of the covers nearly outshine the original versions.

At 90 years of age, Sofia Gubaidulina has honed her musical language amidst conflict. Since 2003, the profoundly religious, visionary, and visceral Russian composer has written three huge, prescient works that depict in musical terms a standoff between God and humankind. All receive their world premiere "live" recordings in this sensational-sounding, system-demanding outpouring from Andris Nelsons and the venerable orchestra that Felix Mendelssohn once led, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig.

Why is Stereophile publishing its fourth review (at least) in three years of a recording of Bach's Six Cello Suites? Partly it's because the suites, which were composed ca 1720 but remained in obscurity until a young Pablo Casals rediscovered them in a secondhand sheet music store in Barcelona in 1890, contain some of the most joyous, moving, and profound music in the Western classical music canon. It's also because these two volumes, which present Grammy Award–winning cellist Zuill Bailey's second recorded exploration of the suites (the first was on Telarc more than two decades ago), abound in astoundingly beautiful musicianship illumined by fresh insights and superb engineering.