November 27, 2013
by The New York Times

THOMAS: ‘Resounding Earth’
Third Coast Percussion
(New Focus Records)
In “Resounding Earth,” composed by Augusta Read Thomas for the Chicago quartet Third Coast Percussion, a constellation of singing, ringing and chiming bells, gongs and other metallic implements, representing cultures and traditions from around the world, serves to honor nine venerated 20th-century composers. Bliss out to Ms. Thomas’s transfixing shimmer on the immaculately recorded CD, and marvel at the ensemble performing the intricate work on the accompanying DVD. (Steve Smith)

SCHUBERT: Symphonies No. 3 in D and No. 4 in C minor (‘Tragic’)
Freiburger Barockorchester, conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado
(Harmonia Mundi)
The young Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado increasingly seems to be one of the most insightful and exciting conductors of the new generation, as this recent recording of Schubert’s Third and Fourth Symphonies makes clear. He draws wonderfully fresh, intelligent and engaging performances from the responsive and skilled players of the Freiburger Barockorchester. (Anthony Tommasini)
CHOPIN: Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor (Op. 58)
Martha Argerich, piano
(EMI Classics)
Lately I haven’t been able to stop listening to the Chopin recording that a 24-year-old Margaret Argerich made in the wake of her breakthrough victory in the 1965 International Chopin Piano Competition. In the great Third Sonata, she claws the knotty passages of the first movement into great waves of sound and leans into the almost unbearable poetry of the Largo. (Zachary Woolfe)
‘CLOSE CONNECTIONS’
Garrick Ohlsson, piano
(Bridge)
The American pianist Garrick Ohlsson is so admired as a performer of standard repertory, especially virtuosic concertos, it is easy to overlook his involvement with contemporary music. For this 2012 recording he plays five gripping and varied works he has championed, the oldest being Stefan Wolpe’s 1936 Passacaglia. There are pieces by Robert Helps and Oldrich Korte, and two scores written for Mr. Ohlsson: William Hibbard’s “Handwork,” composed 1986, and Louis Weingarden’s searching and fiercely difficult “Triptych” — a piece given its premiere in 1969 by the pianist when he was only 21. (Tommasini)
EVA-MARIE HOUBEN: Piano Music
R. Andrew Lee, piano
(Irritable Hedgehog)
Through his consistently impressive solo releases on the curiously named Irritable Hedgehog label, the Colorado-based pianist R. Andrew Lee has asserted a vision of musical Minimalism far broader than the limited patch that abused term usually signifies. On his sixth and latest disc, he plies his estimable concentration and poise in two works by the German composer Eva-Maria Houben, the 40-minute “abgemalt” (“painted out”) and the 23-minute “go and stop,” each a potent, absorbing investigation of sonority and silence. (Smith)

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