Complete recordings of great works such as Bach’s sonatas, his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” or Chopin’s “24 Preludes” occupy a unique place within the history of musical recording. It’s in their entirety that they are most unique and powerful, whereas in the purity of their repertoire, individual pieces are generally regarded as being largely heterogeneous. These timeless compositions transcend their authors and are given new life with each interpretation, and such is the case with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Published in 1741, as the fourth and last part of his Clavier-Übung, the “Goldberg Variations” still remain, almost 300 years later, amongst the baroque master’s most important works, not only for the history of musical composition and recording in general (Glenn Gould, Trevor Pinnock, Rosalyn Tureck, and many others come to mind), but also for Víkingur Ólafsson in particular. “I’ve been dreaming of recording this work for 25 years,” says the Icelandic pianist, thus confirming that these studies are more a life’s work than a whim.Beginning with a melody that’s simple in appearance, the work is spread over a total of 30 variations, becoming a masterpiece of complexity. Determined, at surface level, by a rigid formal framework, the material itself nevertheless demands a “sort of interpretive improvisation”. Ólafsson recognises this paradox and makes it his own not by interpreting the different variations with technical precision and a strict loyalty to the metronome, but rather by following cyclical impulses and organic interpretation. At the same time, he evolves with the work and transcends it, whether in the creativity of the fugues or the complexity of the different canons, which influence one another, rely on one another, and, finally, like a parabola, return to the first melody and the beginning of all that had transpired previously -  like the ebb and flow of the Icelandic ocean, whose waves we know will always return to shore, but whose calm or strength we can never be sure of. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

It’s almost as if Yuja Wang were playing at home in her second collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. The music of Rachmaninov has no secrets left for the Chinese piano virtuoso, who strolls happily along these formidably difficult concertos. It’s the “Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18”, the most iconic, that leads. Composed in 1901, at the time when Rachmaninov was just beginning to recover from the depression caused by the failure of his first symphony, this concerto became one of the centrepieces of the Russian composer’s work, when it was notoriously sampled in the legendary pop hit “All by myself”. Yuja Wang moves with alarming ease along a score rife with traps, starting with the tenth intervals that are every pianist’s worst nightmare. Wang offers a sublime variety in her playing, marvellously befitting of the very distinct moods of the three movements: raging and bold attacks in the “moderato”, languid legatos in the “adagio sostenuto”, and finishing with a triumphant and luminous “allegro scherzando”. “Concertos No. 1” and “No.4” are served with the same mastery, and the album closes with a “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” where the orchestra proves to be of tremendous precision. An impeccable record. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz

Few bands captured the Zeitgeist like blink-182 did during their time as the irreverent kings of Warped Tour-era pop punk in the late '90s and early 2000s. Like a nasally, SoCal, three-headed hydra, the band, featuring singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge, singer/bassist Mark Hoppus, and drummer Travis Barker, broke boundaries, gatecrashing MTV's TRL with their snotty, tongue-in-cheek music videos and anthems about falling in love at rock shows, making prank calls, and generally being stupid and having fun. Of course, there were darker times ahead, with DeLonge quitting the band and then returning and quitting again. Barker survived a 2008 plane crash that left him with multiple injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. Finally, in 2021, Hoppus successfully underwent chemotherapy to treat a rare form of lymphoma, a diagnosis that ultimately brought the trio back together, looking to heal old wounds and rekindle lost friendships. It's that feeling of gripping onto the past right before it slips away that the reunited blink-182 capture on their ninth studio album (or tenth, depending on if you count their initial demo), 2023's One More Time.... Produced by Barker, the album is their first to feature DeLonge since 2011's Neighborhoods. While the albums the group made with Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba (2016's California and 2019's Nine) were solidly crafted, they always felt like something was missing. That something was DeLonge's goofy sincerity and hyper-resonant croon, two key elements of the group's classic sound, along with their crisp guitar, bass, and drum riffs that are front and center throughout all of One More Time.... Cuts like "Dance with Me," "Bad News," and "Fell in Love" are classic blink-anthems that wouldn't sound out of place on Enema of the State or Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. Yet, there are wounds here, and the band dig deep into them, working through the mess of bad breakup on "More Than You Know" and revealing the stark truth about taking someone's presence in your life for granted on "You Don't Know What You've Got," the latter of which finds their voices intertwined in a throaty harmony. There's certainly the sense that blink-182 are working through the pain of the past two decades on One More Time..., including the death of close friends, divorces, and their own interpersonal drama. It's a vibe of carpe diem that they explicitly underline on the title track, singing "I know that next time ain't always gonna happen/I gotta say, 'I love you' while we're here." One More Time... plays like a love letter, both to fans who stuck with them and to each other -- a letter that doesn't so much ask for forgiveness as offer it willingly, passionately, and without conditions.© Matt Collar /TiVo

The piano etudes of Philip Glass were, like 19th century examples of the form, technical studies. Glass, in fact, wrote them over two decades as a way of improving his own piano skills. Yet they are also, like Chopin's etudes, little compositional studies that establish a set of parameters and explore it in a basic way. They offer the excellent means to come to grips with Glass' musical language, and they reveal the personalities of their performers more than most of his other compositions. Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson emerged to acclaim as part of a joint recital of all 20 etudes at the Barbican in London, and his work here fulfills the promise shown. After an overture from Glassworks (1981), Ólafsson launches into a sequence of 11 etudes. He doesn't follow the original order, but this is all to the good: the Glass etudes are self-contained pieces, and his progression is convincing. Ólafsson's touch is light, sweeping, dreamy, and evocative of the mystical side of the composer's personality. He catches the logic of each etude as it unfolds the implications of the very simple material with which it begins. And he makes an unusual decision: one etude, and the opening Glassworks excerpt in a return appearance as a postlude, are "reworked" by Christian Badzura with the addition of a part for string quartet. Ólafsson's own notes don't offer any justification for this, and the forces in Glass' music are less optional than in that of his contemporaries. But it's strangely compelling, and after the especially lush "Etude No. 20" -- as good a place as any to start sampling -- the addition of the string quartet to the Glassworks music seems to take the mood to a higher plane. This is a very fine Glass recording, beautifully engineered in an Icelandic hall.© James Manheim /TiVo

The German poet Goethe said, and is duly quoted in the booklet here, that a string quartet is "a spirited conversation among four reasonable people." That is not what Bach's Art of Fugue is, but string quartets seem impelled to keep performing the work, and audiences buy the move; the rarefied air of the string quartet seems to fit with Bach's contrapuntal mysteries somehow. This release by the Cuarteto Casals made classical best-seller charts in the late spring of 2023. It is one of the better string quartet attempts, both hewing to and departing from the work's Baroque character. First violinist Abel Tomás Realp mostly cultivates a glassy sound with little vibrato, as if his line were being played on an organ, but the other players allow themselves to be more expressive. The general approach is deliberate, and the members speak at length in the interview-style booklet about the necessity for deep contemplation in approaching the work. It is almost as if the group is seeking to clarify its contrapuntal intricacies. The music broadens out in the four canons, which are placed at the end right before the final fugue. That is given a little conclusion rather than being left hanging, as in Bach's unfinished manuscript, and it leads into the chorale Vor deinen Thron tret' ich, BWV 668, which Bach himself might have intended. The sound from Spain's Cardona monastery fits with the goals of the performance, which is to add a new layer of mystery to this perennially troublesome work.© James Manheim /TiVo

Musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS, film score composer (Soul, 2020), and multi award-winning musician for his solo album WE ARE in 2021, Jon Batiste is an artist that we might call a jack of all trades.The American returns in 2023 with World Music Radio, a record that, in a way, reflects this aspect of his personality: assuming the role of a griot/DJ and erasing musical frontiers, he embraces as many popular musics of the world as possible in order to prove the universal dimension of his own.As indicated by its title, this conceptual, erudite album takes the form of a radio show in which the host Jon Batiste broadcasts this musical firework from Earth to the rest of the universe. Even if on certain tracks, the insanity of the project falls a bit flat and transforms into mainstream pop, Jon Batiste hits the mark with songs like “My Heart” (with the jazz trombonist Rita Payés), “Calling Your Name” (with a melodica solo played by Batiste himself), as well as the moving piano ballad “Butterfly”, written for his wife Suleika Jaouad, who is fighting cancer. Apart from the aforementioned artists, World Music Radio is brimming with featured artists that also speak to the album’s international ambitions, from the saxophone solo of the legendary Kenny G on the interlude “Clair de lune”, to the stunning intervention of Français Chassol (on a track named after him), not to mention Lana Del Rey on the suave “Life Lesson”. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

The long-awaited new album from Daniil Trifonov is finally here! It comes fully dedicated to the music of Rachmaninoff, and, more specifically, to his three cycles of variations for piano. First of all, we have the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, a late work composed in the summer of 1934, which stands as one of Rachmaninoff’s great scores, alongside the Third Symphony, The Bells, the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom , and the Symphonic Dances. For this recording the Philadelphia Orchestra, working under the leadership of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, focus on the young Russian virtuoso with rapt attention, who then proceeds with another of the Russian composer’s great cycles, the underappreciated Variations on a Theme by Chopin , whose main theme resumes on the opening bars of the 20th Prelude of Op. 28, in C minor. Rachmaninoff designs from a highly polyphonic basis a work of rare complexity, and shape, through its harmonies. He has Chopin in mind, of course, for his lyrical side (Variations 6 and 21), but also J.S Bach (Variation 1), and Schumann – for the big Finale – whose epic touch ghosts the Symphonic Studies Op. 13. This partition, which allowed Trifonov to remove some passages, is believed by some performers to be an immense lyric poem in which notes turn literally into words (notably Jorge Bolet, and his magical phrasing, for Decca in 1986!). Others wish to unify it, like the young Trifonov himself, whose gesture is aimed primarily at a sense of fluidity. After a relatively brief, bright, tribute to Rachmaninov composed by the pianist himself, the album closes with the famous Variations on a Theme by Corelli, which is in fact the theme of "La Follia", which was used ceaselessly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all over Europe. © Qobuz

If the title Enema of the State didn't give it away, it should be clear from songs like "Dumpweed," "What's My Age Again?," and "Dysentery Gary" that moving to a major label isn't a sign of maturity for blink-182. "Dammit (Growing Up)," the first single from their third album, Dude Ranch, brought them a wider audience and the attention of major labels, which was just too tempting to resist. They signed with MCA, but the only sign that Enema of the State is a major-label effort is the somewhat cleaner production and the fact that they could afford porn superstar Janine -- all decked out as (surprise!) an enema nurse -- for the album cover. Of course, the lovely Janine is as much an indication as "Going Away to College," a catchy little number that pretty much repeats the narrative of "Dammit": blink-182 is not growing up, no way, no how, nowhere. And that's fine, because few of their peers are quite as blissfully stupid and effortlessly catchy as them. Sure, they might not show the emotional depth of Green Day, but they have good tunes and deliver them in a speedy, punchy fashion. Enema of the State isn't going to change anyone's life -- unless it's the first time a 13-year-old boy has seen Janine -- and it will likely irritate old codgers, but it's a fun record that's better than the average neo-punk release.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

One may well wonder why (or whether) a non-keyboard version of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, arguably at the apex of the entire tradition of keyboard music, is at all needed. However, Baroque violinist Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque member Chad Kelly, who "reimagined" the work (arranged is not a strong enough word), offer several justifications for their deployment of the Variations across various kinds of chamber music here. "Despite what many respected and respectful commentators have propagated," Kelly says, "it is not a sacrosanct work of pure, absolute and abstract art." Kelly seeks to use the varied settings to clarify Bach's counterpoint, to examine the musical influences that were in the air when Bach wrote the work, and to "be idiomatic to the historical instruments used in its performance and to the individual styles and genres referenced in the work." All this involves rewriting certain passages. That is a lot to ask, but generally, Kelly and Podger make it work. There are just 18 tracks, with several variations often combined into a little suite. This tends to deemphasize the tripartite structure of the variations, with a canon every third variation. Listeners can make up their own mind about that, but most will be impressed enough by the smooth Baroque winds in the slower variations, especially the crucial Adagio Variation 26, that they will be won over by this unorthodox effort. This release made classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

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A sobered-up Mustaine returns with yet another lineup, this one featuring ex-Cacophony guitar virtuoso Marty Friedman and drummer Nick Menza, for what is easily Megadeth's strongest musical effort. As Metallica was then doing, Mustaine accentuates the progressive tendencies of his compositions, producing rhythmically complex, technically challenging thrash suites that he and Friedman burn through with impeccable execution and jaw-dropping skill. Thanks to Mustaine's focus on the music rather than his sometimes clumsy lyrics, Rust in Peace arguably holds up better than any other Megadeth release, even for listeners who think they've outgrown heavy metal. While the whole album is consistently impressive, the obvious highlight is the epic, Eastern-tinged "Hangar 18."© Steve Huey /TiVo

Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, completed in 1976, is well represented on recordings, including in two versions by Reich himself. Yet there is always room for as fine a performance as this. An examination of a random page in the score for the Music for 18 Musicians might give the impression that it is technically unchallenging, but this is emphatically not true. Percussionist Colin Currie, who leads his Colin Currie Group on this self-released album, has a fortunate metaphor for the work: it is, in his words, "the perfect musical beehive," and the awesomely complex interactions between its parts are the responsibility of the players. Another way to look at the work is that, despite its large ensemble, it is chamber music, and it demands the rare ability to interact as a string quartet might. The group here delivers impressive results in music that manages to remain lively even as it is precise and transparent; Reich's chord inversions are clearly audible as they develop and as singers are added to the mix in the persons of the four members of Synergy Vocals (who have worked with Reich before), they are magical. Engineering hounds whom one might quiz about the recording location might fail to identify the Abbey Road Studios in London, but this turns out to be an ideal venue. Those who haven't heard Reich's masterpiece for a while are encouraged to check this new version out. © James Manheim /TiVo

Bruckner performances already began to arrive in advance of the bicentennial of the composer's birth in 2024. Conductor François-Xavier Roth has entered the competition with a symphony series at the helm of the Gürzenich Orchester Köln, where he is chief conductor. Roth is also the conductor of his own historical performance ensemble, Les Siècles, and while his Bruckner is performed on modern instruments, there are more than traces of his specialty here in the Symphony No. 3 in D minor, WAB 103. Roth's string section is medium-sized, his brass measured, and his textures transparent rather than hefty. Those enamored of the mighty readings by a Christian Thielemann or an Andris Nelsons may find this version underpowered, but by the same token, it is an encouraging bicentennial sign that Bruckner can inspire divergent interpretations, and Roth's version is well worth hearing and comparing to others. Sample the very beginning, where Roth makes the music into an analog to the opening of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, a field of fragments out of which themes emerge. His treatment here is exceptionally subtle. His finale is also quite strong, with bits of the musical world, such as a polka, jumping out of the symphonic background; his sound is quieter, but he paradoxically creates a larger musical space. The Gürzenich Orchester Köln responds well to Roth and punches a bit above its weight. This is a promising kickoff to the rounds of Bruckner recordings.© James Manheim /TiVo

The late Beethoven recordings of pianist Mitsuko Uchida have been career makers, and it is cause for celebration that she has capped them with the 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120, a work that perhaps poses deeper interpretive challenges than any of the late sonatas. The Variations often show a kind of rough humor, and a performer may pick up on that, or the player may deemphasize the humor and seek out the epic qualities of the Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, and Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111. Uchida does neither. The outlines of her usual style, high-contrast and a bit dry, are apparent, but she does not let them dominate her reading. What Uchida realizes is that the abrupt transition from humor to the deepest existential ruminations is part and parcel of Beethoven's late style, and she works to hone the particular character of each Beethoven variation. Her left hand, as usual, is strikingly powerful, and this brings out many striking details (consider the stirring variation 16). The trio of slow minor variations toward the end are given great seriousness but are not in the least overwrought; Uchida achieves an elusive Olympian tone through the final variations. There is much more to experience here, for each variation is fully thought out, but suffice it to say that this is one of the great performances of the Diabelli Variations.© TiVo

While the recordings of highlights and hits from Rodgers & Hammerstein's still-popular Oklahoma! have been issued over the years, the complete, as originally orchestrated score (by Richard Rodney Bennett) had yet to be recorded. However, following a live-staged performance at the 2017 BBC Proms, conductor John Wilson took it upon himself to deliver this premiere. He sticks with the original orchestra dimensions as well, which is a good thing since the handpicked members of his Sinfonia of London are powerful enough in this smaller group. Wilson also took advantage of the quality theaters around London, bringing in soloists and a cast ensemble of veterans from stages across England. He does well in selecting a cast here; while all are more than capable singers, they are also able to deliver the vocal acting that is necessary to pull this off. Leading the cast are Nathaniel Hackmann, reprising his role as Curly from the Proms performance, and Sierra Boggess as Laurey. The vocalists and orchestra take full advantage of the space and recording setup, which allows the orchestra to play full out while not overstraining the singers. The beauty of Rodgers' music paired with Hammerstein's book is evident, even if you are unfamiliar with anything but the titular state (if even that!); the imagery of ranches and open cattle land easily comes to mind. This recording should be welcomed with open arms by those who are familiar with the musical, be it either from a stage (generally edited and with cuts) or in its film version with its edits. Oh, what a beautiful mornin', indeed.© Keith Finke /TiVo