Recording of the Month

Those who, like me, hauled ourselves through college music courses will remember being told that the Byrd Mass for five voices is a masterpiece, a claim soon belied when we were played a performance by some desiccated, monochromatic chorus. Had a recording like the new one by The Gesualdo Six been played instead, we might have agreed more readily with the academic judgment.

You might think that by 1931—the year Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) completed his unforgettable Violin Concerto in D Major—orchestral instruments were the same as those used today. Far from it. According to the website of Claire Givens Violins, pure-gut D strings began to disappear after WWI and were wound with aluminum after WWII. Gut A strings ceded to synthetics in 1970, and gut E strings transitioned to steel between 1910 and WWII. With no consistency between modern orchestras, the string sections we hear in live performances and on electrical recordings set down since 1926 are, for the most part, a grab bag. Wind instruments and pianos have changed as well, and halls have increased in size and pitch has risen. Put all that together, and you can well understand why this "period instrument" recording of music Stravinsky completed between 1907 and 1931 is a revelation.

Prolific composer, vocalist, and violinist Caroline Shaw, who turned 40 just last year, possesses a unique gift—one that earned her the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Shaw has translated the old performer edict "Don't let them see you sweat" into her compositional craft and mastered the art of expressing complex thoughts economically through the simplest of means. Using minimal gestures, spare instrumentation, and unpredictable shifts in rhythm, pitch, and texture, she manages to create one masterful, all-engrossing composition after the other.

Despite world-class songwriting and great singing from Ray Davies, solid guitar work from brother Dave, a run of six classic albums from Face to Face (1966) to Muswell Hillbillies (1971), multiple hit singles and albums in the US and the UK, the Kinks are rarely mentioned, on either side of the Atlantic, in the same breath as contemporaries the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Why is that?

Howard Jones has always come across as an endearing blend of mad scientist and hopeless romantic. Since his 1983 debut single, "New Song," he has blended obsessive technical detail with extreme emotionality. His newest album, Dialogue, is the latest example of this approach, in which intricate structures of synthesized sound grow into musical mountains supporting impassioned lyrics.