From my new Clas­si­cal TV col­umn:

It’s good we have these new discs, and it’s good this can be done with music. Musi­cians play­ing music is roughly com­pa­ra­ble to writ­ers read­ing the works of oth­ers for their own per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion and aes­thetic inspi­ra­tion. Writ­ers read and re-read, and how they feel about a book will change over time, through age, expe­ri­ence and espe­cially the prism of the other books they have read. But what can a writer do with this other than talk about it or use it as fuel for their work? Music is dif­fer­ent. The size and scope of a sym­phony may be like a novel, but a sym­phony is a set of instruc­tions for musi­cians to fol­low, it’s like tak­ing dried mush­rooms and recon­sti­tut­ing them in broth. The sym­phony pre­serves a composer’s ideas, but it requires musi­cians to turn it into some­thing we can expe­ri­ence. And how musi­cians do that can, and should, change. What do weeks and years of meals, sleep­ing, love and heartache, travel, com­pan­ion­ship and lone­li­ness, sat­is­fac­tions and frus­tra­tions, books and elec­tions and fam­ily and clothes and clouds have to do with the length of a dot­ted eighth-note, the full­ness of a crescendo, the rel­a­tive weight of notes in a phrase, and espe­cially the out­pour­ing of inchoate, raw, won­der­ful emo­tion from deep in the chest, down through the arm and out of the baton or bow? Only absolutely everything.

There are two new discs in ques­tion, the first install­ment in the sec­ond Sibelius cycle from Osmo Vän­skä, this time with the Min­nesota Orches­tra. It’s already quite dif­fer­ent than his pre­vi­ous set, and shows a way with Sibelius that is refresh­ingly out of the ordi­nary on the con­tem­po­rary scene (his pre­vi­ous cycle, with the Lahti Sym­phony, is con­sis­tently good and can still be had for the ridicu­lously low price of $7.99 for the com­plete down­load, mean­ing you really must buy it, even if you don’t like Sibelius … you will!)
The other disc is Isabelle Faust’s return to the Beethoven Vio­lin Con­certo, paired with Berg’s Con­certo. This is an excep­tional record­ing with sim­ply the finest play­ing of the Berg I’ve heard and incom­pa­ra­ble play­ing of the Beethoven. It’s guar­an­teed to be one of the lead­ing releases of 2012, and has earned a place in the Bit City library of essen­tial record­ings. Buy it.