CD Releases of the Week 

For his latest release, Jon Batiste utilizes his prodigious talent for improvisation with an album filled with mostly short piano pieces that take as their start various works by Beethoven, from the piano sonatas to the mighty symphonies (5, 7 and 9, of course). Batiste takes the seeds of Beethoven’s melodies and over the course of several minutes transforms them through his own unique stylings—as Batiste says in his liner note, Beethoven would have been playing the blues if that was a genre 200 years ago.

 

 

The disc’s closing work, Für Elise—Reverie—15 imaginative and always invigorating minutes—is a master class of improv that reminds me of Batiste’s 2022 Carnegie Hall concert I attended where he played exhilarating piano improvisations for 90 thrilling minutes.

 

 

 

Ludwig van Beethoven—The Piano Concertos 

In the increasingly crowded pool of complete Beethoven piano concerto recordings, German pianist and conductor Alexander Lonquich dives right in by doing double duty at the keyboard and on the podium, leading the Munich Chamber Orchestra in an impressive traversal of the most imposing concerto cycles ever composed.

 

 

In addition to the sensitive orchestral accompaniment, Lonquich also displays his pianistic eloquence throughout, most memorably in the second and fifth (“Emperor”) concertos, which sound urgent and immediate in these fresh-sounding performances.

 

 

 

Benjamin Britten—The Prince of the Pagodas 

Benjamin Britten’s lone full-length ballet score was commissioned by the Royal Ballet and premiered in 1962; it might be the only ballet inspired by both King Lear and Beauty and the Beast in its story of an Asian ruler who gives his kingdom to his bad daughter instead of the good one, with typically unsurprising results.

 

 

Britten’s score is endlessly inventive, especially in the use of the Balinese gamelan, an instrument that provides authentic Eastern flavor. This first-rate recording, by the Hallé orchestra, is under the steady baton of conductor Kahchun Wong.

 

 

 

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra—Contemporary Landscapes 

JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO) give more proof—if any were needed—that they are one of the most versatile orchestral ensembles around; this disc’s four premieres, all written in the past five years, were commissioned by the BPO.

 

 

The wide-ranging works are Kenneth Fuchs’ Point of Tranquility (2020), inspired by a Morris Louis painting; Russell Platt’s Symphony in Three Movements (2019-20), dedicated to artist Clyfford Still, many of whose works are in the Buffalo AKG Museum; Randall Svane’s Oboe Concerto (2023), featuring the BPO’s excellent principal oboist Henry Ward; and Wang Jie’s The Winter That United Us (2022), which celebrates the city of Buffalo. They’re all performed with authority by Falletta and the orchestra. 

 

 

 

Simone Dinnerstein—The Eye Is the First Circle 

For her latest scintillating solo disc, Simone Dinnerstein tackles a true Everest of the piano repertoire, Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata—45 minutes of impressionistic portraits of four towering American thinkers (Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau)—in her usual inimitable fashion.

 

The sonata was recorded in 2021 as part of an installation that paired her father Simon’s painting (reproduced in the disc’s jacket) with the music, as Dinnerstein plays with intense concentration throughout, giving Ives’ remarkably dichotomic work clarity and coherence.