Five Classical Albums You Need To Hear

Solo cello, avant-garde opera, death-metal Bach, and more

Yes, I said this was a classical roundup — keep reading…

We’re back! Welcome to all new subscribers — there are more than 5000 of you now, a fact which astonishes and thrills me.

Big Announcement #1! We are planning to release four albums on Burning Ambulance Music in 2026! They are:

Wadada Leo Smith, Constellations and Hemispheres: A new collection of studio recordings featuring multiple groups — two different trios, a quartet, a sextet and an octet

Ava Mendoza, Alive Alone and Alive Together: A live album, half solo guitar and half guitar-drums duos with Hamid Drake

Joel Futterman/William Parker, Transcendent Universe: A studio album featuring three epic piano/bass duos

Michael Sarian & Esquina, In This Desert: A studio album by trumpeter Sarian and his quartet; this one is going to be a double CD

Two of these albums will be out in May, and the other two in late August. As always, they will be limited editions of 500 CDs, in heavy-duty gatefold mini-LP sleeves with art and design by the brilliant I.A. Freeman. We’ll be announcing pre-orders for the first two very soon, so keep an eye on our Bandcamp page.

And don’t forget: Paid subscribers to this newsletter are entitled to free downloads of Burning Ambulance Music releases, so consider upgrading.

Big Announcement #2! I have signed a contract with Zer0 Books, publishers of my 2002 book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, to release a 25th anniversary revised and expanded edition of my first book, New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz. It will probably be out in the fall (the first version was published on 9/11), and I’ll offer more updates as I have them.

For those who don’t know, New York Is Now! chronicled the late ’90s out jazz scene in New York and featured interviews with and profiles of David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Charles Gayle, and Joe Morris, and also laid out the ecosystem in which they operated, describing some of the labels that were releasing that music at the time and exploring the inner workings of the Vision Festival. This new edition will feature additional material describing what some of these players have been doing in the years since the book came out, and will conclude with a chapter highlighting musicians I consider to be important new free jazz voices. It will also remove some dumb, unnecessarily bridge-burning stuff that I regretted almost as soon as the book hit store shelves. Overall, I think it’ll be a better book, and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Morton Feldman’s music presents a challenge I sometimes fear I’m simply not up to. I find myself thinking about it before I listen to it, while I’m listening to it, and after a given piece has ended. And a lot of that has to do with its extraordinary duration.

For those who don’t know, Feldman wrote a lot of very long, slow, minimal pieces, often for just two or three instruments, and they require buy-in from a listener in a way that very few other composers’ works do. For example, the solo piano composition For Bunita Marcus runs well over an hour. It consists of short phrases with long pauses between them, during which the final notes ring out and fade away. It’s really beautiful music — I once saw Aki Takahashi perform it. But it’s so slow, and so long, that it’s impossible to hold it in memory. By the time it ends, you have no idea how it started, or what happened along the way. You come out of it like waking up from hypnosis.

The GBSR Duo and Taylor MacLennan have recorded three Feldman pieces — Why Patterns?, Crippled Symmetry, and For Philip Guston — on a 6CD box from the Another Timbre label. All three are scored for flute, piano, and percussion. The shortest, Why Patterns?, runs 30 minutes; Crippled Symmetry is 92 minutes; and For Philip Guston is four and a half hours long. And every time I sit down to listen to this music, which is really beautiful, I find myself asking, What am I supposed to do with this?

Set aside the idea of having four and a half hours to sit down and listen to a single piece of music, without life interfering. Just managing that in 2026 should earn you a prize. But let’s say you do. Attempting to hold it in your mind afterward will be impossible. Moments may stick with you, but the work as a whole will shimmer out of existence like a mirage. I think of Richard Brautigan’s phrase, “loading mercury with a pitchfork”.

The difficulty level only increases when you remember that Feldman wanted you to listen to his music quietly; in the liner notes, percussionist George Barton writes, “Listeners are encouraged to find a volume level that allows them to listen… without amplifying the music to the point of loudness.” And as Barton points out, For Philip Guston’s extreme length is meant to screw with your brain in exactly the way I’ve described: “Where a traditional Western musical form is organised in such a way as to present material in a way as conducive as possible to immediate comprehension, sorting and later recall, Feldman proposes ‘a conscious attempt at “formalizing” a disorientation of memory”.

It’s very beautiful music. If you have a multi-CD changer, put it on, read a book, walk around, coexist with it. You’ll be glad you did. But it seems designed to turn actually listening to it in any kind of focused way into an athletic event or endurance test. “I did it! I made it to the end!”

(Or maybe I’m just a dumbass, and everybody else is happily listening to For Philip Guston front to back, focused and attentive, and wringing every drop of meaning out of it the whole time. That’s certainly a possibility, and one I consider every time I wade into one of his pieces.)

Einstein On The Beach, the opera written by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, premiered 50 years ago this summer, at the Avignon Festival in France on July 25, 1976. In performance, the opera runs about five hours, but recorded versions vary widely in length: the first, from 1979, is 165 minutes, while a 2014 Blu-Ray version runs 270 minutes. Last year, a fifth version was released by the ensemble Ictus, featuring Collegium Vocale Gent and, as the “Narrator,” Suzanne Vega. It was recorded live at Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg on November 27, 2022, but subject to rigorous studio processing (including overdubs) after the fact.

At 147 minutes, it’s the shortest version yet released, and/but it has the pulsing energy of techno. It begins with nearly 20 seconds of low industrial rumble, before the opera’s best-known aspect — the singers reciting sequences of numbers “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6” — are heard, and then a moment later Vega begins to recite the abstract, repetitive texts that make up the opera’s four acts. Her voice, especially on headphones, is a warm whisper like a late-night DJ, a woman whose show might precede re-broadcasts of old Joe Frank tapes.

The Vision String Quartet’s new album In The Fields — oh, sorry, that’s in the fields by vision string quartet — presents a 66-minute program of music by Bartók, Ravel and Dvořák, alongside a version of a Bulgarian folk song and several original pieces. They’re joined by several guests: guitarist Mahan Mirarab, pianist Joel Lyssarides, and percussionist Bernhard Schimpelsberger, the latter of whom injects what they call “percussive dimensions” into their interpretation of Bartók’s already quite dramatic String Quartet No. 4. The label press release says that vision string quartet perform standing up (except for the cellist, I assume) and without referring to sheet music, a showbizzy touch that makes sense given their music, which is romantic and blends classical, jazz, and folk music from various parts of the world in a way that reminds me of how GoGo Penguin combine jazz with electronic music and Coldplay-esque modern rock. This is populist classical music — a good thing! — made by photogenically scruffy young men, and I have no doubt they sell a lot of concert tickets. And it’s a good album.

Cellist Christopher Hoffman’s REX is a solo CD, but he uses loops and multiple layers to create an immersive feel. He also plays an electric cello on several tracks, which gives the music a deep, almost metallic roar; “Saboteur” is shockingly heavy. I’ve seen Hoffman perform as part of Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, and enjoyed his playing on multiple Threadgill albums and James Brandon Lewis’s Eye Of I. The album is named for Rex Brasher, a self-taught painter who created the 12-volume book The Birds and Trees of North America. Hoffman moved into Brasher’s former house, and recorded the album there. The 13 tracks are short, minimalist vignettes that allow him to deploy all sorts of droning and plucking techniques, and/but while there are almost certainly improvised passages here and there, this is carefully structured and composed music.

Alkaloid is a German progressive metal band featuring guitarist/vocalist Florian “Morean” Maier, bassist Linus Klausenitzer, and drummer Hannes Grossmann. The latter two men are both ex-members of Obscura, one of my favorite prog-death bands, and Maier is also a classical composer. Bach Out Of Bounds is a live album on which the trio expands to an 11-member ensemble that includes two additional guitarists, two female vocalists, two violinists, a cellist and an accordionist. They perform three songs from their back catalog — “Cthulhu,” from 2015’s The Malkuth Grimoire, and “A Fool’s Desire” and “The Fungi From Yuggoth,” from 2023’s Numen — but most of the material is new, and the reason it’s being written up in this column is that three of the pieces (“Allegro,” “Adagio — All is Vanity” and “Agnus Dei”) are radical interpretations of works by Bach. Prog-metal has often stolen from classical anyway, and the strings are an excellent complement to Maier’s shredtastic guitar solos. This is an extremely enjoyable exercise in genre hybridization, beautiful and headbang-worthy at the same time.

That’s it for now. See you on Friday.