Five Classical Albums You Need To Hear

Concertos, organ works, gamelan music and more

Isabelle Faust

Every fourth Tuesday of a given month, I’ll be reviewing five new albums, sometimes focusing on a single genre and other times grabbing whatever sounds good. This week, we’re all about classical. We’re defining that term pretty broadly, of course, but each of the records below is brilliant in its own way. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Some years ago I interviewed violinist Isabelle Faust for the BA podcast. We had a fascinating discussion about all sorts of things, and what came through very strongly for me was her love of discovering new music, premiering pieces or presenting music in unorthodox combinations. For example, she’s got a CD where she pairs a violin concerto by Beethoven with one by Alban Berg. She records and performs the work of modern composers whenever she gets the opportunity, and has even had pieces written for her, but as she told me,

“It’s very often super hard to convince the concert organizers to program a piece that the public might not know that well, or maybe not know at all, just simply because the classical public is an animal of habits and they seem to only be relaxed and at ease when they can whistle along and they know already what is going to come and they know also how it’s going to come. That’s also a point which is sometimes frustrating and a little bit irritating for me, that when you play a piece that they know by heart and they have their very dear and favorite recording at home which they play 10 times in the same day and they know it by heart, and you come and you try to give them a fresh and new vision of this piece — of the same piece — that the public can get really frustrated because it’s not being played exactly like they are used to from their favorite CD. So there’s a certain adventurous sense which is kind of lacking in many of our classical listeners… I’m always thrilled to find new or not so new but rarely performed stuff which is really great music, and then very often I have to really, really watch out for occasions to finally bring them to the public.”

Faust’s latest release is Ligeti: Violin, Piano & Românesc Concertos, performed with pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger and the ensemble Les Siècles, and conducted by François-Xavier Roth. It offers three pieces by György Ligeti from various points in his career — the Concert Românesc was written in 1951, the Piano Concerto in stages between 1985 and 1988, and the Violin Concerto is from 1993. Speaking as an ignoramus, I would say I don’t hear any through-lines common to all three pieces. The Violin Concerto, which opens the disc, consists of five segments, each of which seems to be doing something completely different in an attempt to evoke different eras, from medieval music to Baroque and Romantic styles. It’s often chaotic and overpowering, and reminds me of the way modern classical music is often used as a disorienting effect in film scoring. The Concert Românesc, on the other hand, is a light folk-music-y thing full of big, sweeping gestures. You could program it alongside a piece by Aaron Copland and no one would blink. And the Piano Concerto fits somewhere in between; bouncy and exciting at times, but with passages of great weirdness. There are also two pieces by György Kurtág, Aus der Ferne III and V, serving as interstitial interludes. I don’t know if this album works as an album, but each of the three main pieces has its own value and is worth hearing, and Faust is a highly skilled violinist who blends extremely well with Les Siècles.

Hampus Lindwall is the organist at the church of Saint-Esprit in Paris; he’s also a noted composer. Brace For Impact, released on Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label, is a collection of five pieces for pipe organ and occasional electric guitar. Lindwall recorded his parts on a 78-stop organ at St. Antonius church in Düsseldorf in August 2024; O’Malley’s guitars had been recorded two years earlier, at Pôle Nord Studio in Paris, in August 2022. The title piece sounds like a cross between Sunn O))) and Iannis Xenakis, with tone-clouds from the organ punctuated/interrupted by guitars that recall Jonny Greenwood’s legendary crunching chord from Radiohead’s “Creep”. But the next two pieces, “Swerve” and “À Bruit Secret”, are for organ alone, slightly altered by studio post-production. In the latter piece, he leaps back and forth between short tootling runs that sound like early computer music and huge organ stabs. And “AFK” begins with an almost literally stunning sustained blast of elbows-on-the-keys mega-chords. Play this one loud.

Ensemble Nist-Nah is an eight- or nine-piece ensemble led by Australian percussionist Will Guthrie. Their second album, Spilla, features two different versions of the group on the two sides of the LP; a total of 15 musicians are involved. Gamelan is a large element of their sound, but there’s lots of other stuff going on. They employ Western drum kits, junk percussion, a vast array of gongs and cymbals, and studio production to create a hypnotizing, all-encompassing world of sound that’s got as much in common with Autechre or Miles Davis’s On The Corner as it does with M’Boom, Roscoe Mitchell’s The Maze, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, or the bowed gong music of Thomas Köner. The sheer complexity and variety of tones and resonances created by all these objects — the way they rumble, tinkle, zing, boom, click, clatter, and ring out at such length it sounds like electronic feedback, and the way notes don’t just sustain but seem to bend in the air — is mind-warping. It feels dumb to use words like “unearthly”, but when you listen to this record on headphones you really can start to feel like you’re floating in a space station, or a bathysphere miles beneath the ocean. It’s meditative, but also ominous, and I love it.

R-O-R is a duo project by Icelandic musicians Gyða Valtýsdóttir (cello) and Úlfur Hansson (synths, production, etc.). AUGA, which I choose to believe is pronounced “ah-ooh-ga” like an old-timey car horn, is a collection of nine pieces running 78 minutes in all. They’re all very beautiful in a stark, standing-on-a-rainy-Icelandic-beach-staring-at-a-corpse sort of way. Yes, this music would make an ideal soundtrack to the Nordic murder mystery Netflix show of your choice. The cello groans, the synths moan and shimmy, and you feel the need to put on an extra layer just listening to it. Each piece is slightly different, and there are some interesting touches, like a sound that reminds me of swarming insects on “Imine”, but they’re all essentially the same, smooth and subdued in color, like rocks on a beach. It could easily be one long piece broken into nine movements. I’m torn about this record. I love the sound of the cello. I love the sound of analog synths. The production effects are subtle but well crafted. It has all the elements of something that I should find totally enthralling. But it’s “furniture music”, to use Erik Satie’s phrase. It’s something I can kinda take or leave, and I think it’s the music’s fault, not mine. It does not insist on itself, and for that reason it’s something I’m probably going to forget I own by the time you read this. But you might find it totally absorbing!

Ryan Vigil is a pianist and composer whose works are frequently untitled. On his website, he cites “a few non-composers who mean as much to me as any composers do… people like Matsuo Basho, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Yasujirō Ozu, Samuel Beckett, I. M. Pei.” If you’re now thinking, Boy, I bet his music is really slow and minimal!, you’re absolutely right. Again, quoting Vigil himself: “here are some ways that one might describe my music: it tends to be soft; it tends to be slow; it tends to be patient; it seems to be more about creating an environment in which sounds happen than about narrative or emotion.” Vigil, Vol. 1, on New Focus, contains two pieces: untitled work for violin and piano (2009) and untitled work for violin and piano (2019), both performed by violinist Lilit Hartunian and pianist John McDonald. The first is 51 minutes long, the second just 22, and they both sound like musicians warming up prior to playing a Morton Feldman piece. Long violin notes trail slowly across the room as haunted-house chords escape from the piano. Vigil says his music “is not meant to be understood in relation to other music”, but comparisons are inescapable. And I’m OK with that. I listen to far too much death metal, dub reggae, techno and D-beat hardcore to ever complain about music that tells you exactly what it is right up front. What’s more annoying is music that insists it’s doing something unique when it’s not. Slow, quiet, minimal chamber music is a thing. I like it, you like it. When you want some, Ryan Vigil has some available. Will you be reminded of other slow, quiet, minimal chamber music you’ve heard in the past? Yes, and that’s fine. When you eat a really good roast beef sandwich, you don’t say, My god, I have never tasted such a thing before! You say, Wow, that was a really good roast beef sandwich; I think I’ll go take a nap.

That’s it for now. See you on Friday, when we’ll be talking about the work of vocalist Lauren Newton.