Lately it seems like every year, when I look back on my favorite classical albums, I always think, "Well, let's face it: It's been a pretty cruel year, and this is the music that helped get me through it." I hate using music as a crutch, but it surely does offer a singular distraction. This year, the search for musical transcendence felt tougher than usual, as politics and world affairs sunk their claws into me. Perhaps that's why I spent a lot of the year clinging to an 18-year-old Stars of the Lid album like a freaking life raft.
And yet, the 10 extraordinary albums below did their part and more, buoying me and renewing my faith in humanity — especially the immersive acoustic-electronic sound world of experimental cellist Clarice Jensen, the hip-shaking rhythms of Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, the brilliantly blended rays of light emanating from the Vox Clamantis choir singing the sacred music of Arvo Pärt and a few new and re-discoveries from the Belcea Quartet, the late Sofia Gubaidulina and the effervescent Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Here's hoping these albums bring you joy, and possibly a little musical therapy, as we close out another challenging year.
Clarice Jensen
In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness
For Those Who Like: J.S. Bach, cello, drones
The Story: Perhaps the most restless and fascinating cellist working today, Clarice Jensen collaborates with the likes of Björk, Taylor Swift and My Chemical Romance when she's not directing the American Contemporary Music Ensemble or making startling albums on her own. In holiday clothing, maybe her best yet, finds the Juilliard graduate spotlighting the natural voice of her cello while tastefully bolstering it with subtle electronics (quite a 180 from her previous recording, which all but left the cello behind). The title steals a line from Rilke, while the music, Jensen says, has "led to a new personal and conceptual exploration of what 'solo' means, what the number one means against the backdrop of zero, or if two can feel like a division of one rather than a multiplication."
The Music: Jensen has hit a high mark in her quest to blend the cello with modern technology. Applying a modest amount of gear — loopers, octave shifters and "freeze" pedals — Jensen creates wide canvases of expression inspired by Bach's solo cello suites. The undulating, bittersweet measures of the title track sound like a 21st century update to the beginning of Bach's First Suite, and when a countermelody in high register gently washes in, a moment of release arrives that feels dangerously close to ecstasy. Another piece pits buzzy retro electronics against warm cello layers, while the closing work, "Unity," launches with lonely single bow strokes, but blossoms into a tsunami of color and light. The album mesmerizes, and reveals fresh layers with each listen.
James McVinnie
Dreamcatcher
For Those Who Like: Philip Glass, pipe organs, prog rock
The Story: James McVinnie would like to change your mind about the pipe organ. On this sparkling album, the British keyboardist plays the instrument at St. Alban's Cathedral, north of London, sporting 4,500 pipes — the organ he once played as a precocious teenager. Instead of 200-year-old classics, McVinnie offers contemporary pieces that expose the power and flair of the instrument. And because one cannot live on organ music alone, he includes solo piano works by today's top composers and a few impressive newcomers.
The Music: Terrific examples of McVinnie's agile fingers and fleet feet are abundant on the album, especially in Riff-raff, a quirky organ work that "pulls out all the stops" in passages that squawk and ping, or bust out a baseball stadium boogie-woogie. While Nico Muhly's Patterns, with its oscillating tapestries, might be the album's "organic" high point, there are arresting piano pieces by the young Californian Gabriella Smith (the concussive Imaginary Pancake), newcomer inti figgis-vizueta (the sparse, beautiful build-it-yourself) and Marcos Balter, whose cascades of interlocking notes lend the album its title.
Gabriela Ortiz
Yanga
For Those Who Like: Stravinsky, Mexican history, booty shaking
The Story: Following her multiple Grammy-winning album last year (my personal 2024 favorite), Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz has done it again with another extraordinary recording featuring superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, more proof that she is one of today's most visible and arresting composers. Ortiz's Mexico City upbringing was steeped in the traditions of her parents, members of the acclaimed folk ensemble Los Folkoristas, who rehearsed in her basement. The colors and rhythms of that music explode with the force of a full symphony orchestra in her work.
The Music: Mexico's Yucatan region is spotlighted in Dzonot, a substantial new cello concerto written for Alisa Weilerstein, who dazzles whether she's conjuring endangered jaguars in elastic grooves or mimicking the machinery of development as it paves over delicate ecosystems. The rambunctious title work, Yanga, adds the LA Master Chorale and the Mexican percussion ensemble Tambuco to the mix, telling the story of Gaspar Yanga, a 16th century African prince who, after decades of Mexican enslavement, becomes a heroic figure and perhaps the earliest Black ruler in the Americas. Ortiz's music teems with Afro-Latin beats, bursts of African chants and drumming interludes. The album closes with a somber homage to the Chilean folk icon Violeta Parra, dressed in strings and probing piano.
Arvo Pärt
And I Heard a Voice
For Those Who Like: Music for Airports, choral opulence, spirituality
The Story: The beloved Estonian composer, who counts Björk, Thom Yorke and Keanu Reeves among his fans, turned 90 this fall — and while he no longer writes music, Pärt still routinely tops charts as the most performed living composer. His music, often slow-moving and spacious, is easy on the ears and can sound almost childlike in its simplicity, but ask a performer and they'll tell you how difficult it is to pull off. Once criticized by Soviet authorities, Pärt's music underwent a drastic makeover in the 1970s, revealing a meditative new style he calls "tintinnabuli" (little bells).
The Music: You needn't be religious to feel a kind of cleansing effect offered by this album of sacred choral pieces. Let them wash over you without consulting the lyrics, but take care to admire the fine brushstrokes Pärt uses to layer the registers of the precise, emotionally warm Vox Clamantis choir. Just take the opening word on the album, "Nunc," which unfolds over 26 seconds as sections of the choir slowly interleave, beginning low in the bass voices, until the singers eventually release full-throated rays of blinding white light. Early in "O Holy Father Nicholas," Pärt instructs a high voice to barely stick out from the choir, holding a single smoky note that hangs in the air like a halo.
Tania León
Orchestral Works
For Those Who Like: Bartok, bold orchestras, Pulitzer winners
The Story: Tania León, the 82-year-old composer who won a "freedom flight" lottery ticket to the U.S. from Havana in 1967, has paid some dues. In the past five years, she's been collecting. She's won at least seven awards, including a Pulitzer and a Grammy (Trustees Award), and was a 2022 Kennedy Center Honoree. León never planned to stay long in the States; she'd aimed to study in Paris. Instead, library books taught her to write music while she worked her first gig as the piano accompanist for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. After formal studies in composition and conducting, she's grown strong roots in New York, and has finally earned much-deserved worldwide respect and visibility.
The Music: The album gathers four orchestral works (including three world premiere recordings) in recent live performances by the London Philharmonic while León was composer-in-residence. Horizons, composed in 1999, flows like an unpredictable river, where Class V rapids erupt in brass and percussion, receding only briefly into calmer waters of glassy strings. In 2024's Raices (Origins), an exuberant dance section gives way to what León calls an "enchanted forest" of winds, culminating in a dialogue between jazzy clarinets and Latin beats. The muscular and cinematically orchestrated Stride, from 2020, won León her Pulitzer, while 2022's Pasajes (Passages), inspired by Cuban landscapes and culture, begins in gentle, Copland-like open spaces and ends with a raucous Carnaval dance party.
Belcea Quartet
Debussy — Szymanowski Quartets
For Those Who Like: Ravel, string quartets, Tatra Mountains
The Story: Romanian violinist Corina Belcea founded the string quartet named for her in 1994. Ever since, the group has quietly built its repertoire and reputation with performances that combine natural musicality, precision and interpretive insight. For its debut album back in 2000, the band put down a fine performance of Claude Debussy's string quartet. Now, 25 years later, it revisits the piece, while also offering a pair of off-the-beaten-path quartets by the early 20th century Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, who was at his peak when he died of tuberculosis in 1937, at age 54.
The Music: Debussy's quartet is a trickster of color, light and shadow; any good performance must feel slightly untethered from the earth. While the Belcea's 2000 recording still holds up, the newer performance adds a dash of rhythmic confidence, its colorations seeming to pop more. The real stars here are the undervalued Szymanowski quartets, which may strike some as an intoxicating blend of Debussy's impressionist haze and Leoš Janáček's prickly lyricism. The second movement from the first quartet, from 1917, is transportive with its bittersweet harmonies and eerie, high-flying calls in the violins. The second quartet, from 10 years later, is inspired by the Tatras Mountains in Southern Poland and sports a kind of Bartok-like, folk-fueled angularity with spasms of violence.
Sofia Gubaidulina
Figures of Time
For Those Who Like: Shostakovich, piano concertos, Soviet noir
The Story: Sofia Gubaidulina was fearless, and so is her music. The Russian composer, who died earlier this year at 93, grew up poor but always seemed to find her way: In 1973, while being strangled in a Moscow elevator (possibly by a KGB operative), she cracked a joke that spooked her attacker into letting her go. Her music earned awards and respect in the West, but was also condemned by the Soviet government. In the '90s, she left Russia for the outskirts of Hamburg and continued to write her distinctive music — large in scope, intellectually rigorous, often spiritual, but intimate in the painterly details she could conjure from a massive orchestra.
The Music: This album is a satisfying primer to Gubaidulina's vast sound world, especially the intricately orchestrated title piece, which pivots from twittering flutes to storms of snarling brass, ending in a peculiar conversation between electric bass guitar, tuba and slithering strings. Also singular is the rarely heard Revue Music, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of jazz, classical, film scores and disco that seamlessly blends a big band with a symphony orchestra (think Lalo Shifrin on mushrooms) and completely bewildered authorities. Religious ideas underlie the smoldering piano concerto Introitus, where bells toll low in the keyboard, secretly conversing with small groups of winds or strings. Chaconne, a solo piano work, unfolds a set of variations on a convulsive theme with a dash of Baroque counterpoint.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir
Ubique
For Those Who Like: Flute, film scores, geothermal energy
The Story: The Icelandic composer, who earned her PhD from the University of California San Diego in 2011, is increasingly recognized for her cutting-edge pieces for orchestra, played by the world's premiere ensembles. Three of her largest symphonic works will see 38 performances in Europe and the U.S. this season alone. But Anna Thorvaldsdottir can also produce powerful results with smaller groups, and the 45-minute Ubique, scored for flutes, two cellos, piano and electronics, does more with less. The work was commissioned by the undaunted flutist Claire Chase, whose 24-year project Density 2036 fosters new repertoire for her instrument.
The Music: Ubique is Latin for "everywhere." Thorvaldsdottir says the sounds in her piece are both "reduced to their smallest particles" and "expanded towards the infinite." The work begins not with a pitch, but a Richter-scale rumble more felt than heard. "I am fascinated with the lower registers for sure," she told me in 2023. And while the slowly metamorphosing music feels grounded in the earth's lower mantle, the various flutes Chase plays (including the six-foot contrabass model) give the music a gaseous lightness, like cosmic dust continually reforming itself. Ubique is a living, breathing beast of a piece, both intimate and infinite, barely contained in all its beauty.
Valentina Goncharova
Campanelli
For Those Who Like: Tony Conrad, free jazz, spontaneous hallucinations
The Story: The Kyiv native, now in her 70s, was classically trained in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) with her ears wide open, soaking up the modernist sounds of Stockhausen and Boulez while also gigging in underground rock clubs. Later, with her recording engineer husband, she moved to Estonia, where he crafted instruments and microphones for her to realize her experimental compositions. Campanelli is the violinist's first album of original material in three decades. Goncharova told The Guardian the album emerged out of a bad feeling she had on Oct. 7, 2023, which compelled her to play music once again. She later learned of the Hamas attack on Israel.
The Music: Goncharova's unrefined, stream-of-consciousness style might not thrill everyone, but the otherworldly, plaintive ribbons of sound infused with folkish melodies have the power to transport. Her distinctive violin tone, downy-soft yet raw and mixed with electronics, is her signature sound, though at times her fiddle can also come across like an ancient double reed. In "I Am Here and Now," the instrument sings a lament buoyed by echoing bow scrapes and bounces. "Halloween" is symphonic in its rich palette of skittering and slithering string treatments, while "Return to Myself," near the end of the album, feels like a struggling yet triumphal voice in the wilderness. With this album, Goncharova taps something almost primordial, a sound world no other violinist has touched.
Freiburg Baroque Orchestra
Grand Tour
For Those Who Like: Concept albums, European travel, Baroque counterpoint
The Story: The concept album is making a comeback. Here, the superb Freiburger Barockorchester, as the group is known in its native Germany, guides us on a trek from its home base in the Southwest, traveling some 400 miles northeast to Berlin, tracing the hits we might have heard along the way in the early 18th century. The band, always filled with vitality and precision, got its start in 1985 when a few Freiburg university students decided to assemble a small orchestra to play old music on period instruments. Their 1990 debut album of C.P.E. Bach symphonies remains a gold standard.
The Music: We begin in Rastatt, home base of the long-forgotten Johann Caspar Fischer, whose regal Suite in D is under the spell of the trendy French overture style. Then on to Stuttgart, where Johann Christoph Pez brought home Italian sounds after his time in Rome, best heard in the lovely dialogue between strings and flutes in his Concerto Pastorale. In Ansbach we meet Johann Kusser, whose energetic Overture bridges French and German music, and in Meiningen we find a distant cousin of J.S. Bach named Joann Ludwig Bach, whose own Overture is a more buttoned-up affair. Two superstars remain: In Eisenach, the astoundingly prolific Georg Philipp Telemann, whose Concerto for Flute and Violin in E minor offers the composer's signature vigor and melodic flow; and Johann Sebastian himself, who traveled from his base in Weimar to Berlin, where, searching for a new harpsichord, he met a local potentate to whom he dedicated his extraordinary Brandenburg Concertos, of which the Second gets a high-spirited performance to bring this fascinating musical journey to a close.
A baker's dozen very honorable mentions:
Grażyna Bacewicz: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2
Jean-Yves Thibaudet: Khachaturian
Sandbox Percussion: Don't Look Down
Alexander Knaifel: Chapter Eight
George Xiaoyuan Fu: Coloring Book
Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky
Raven Chacon: Voiceless Mass
Yuja Wang: Shostakovich - The Piano Concertos
Julia Hamos: Ellis Island
Yunchan Lim: Tchaikovsky — The Seasons
Rolf Lislevand: Libro Primo
Arvo Pärt: Credo
Anna Clyne: Abstractions
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