Goldberg Variations

BERG, BEETHOVEN: VIOLIN CONCERTOS Isabelle Faust, violin Orchestra Mozart Claudio Abbado (Harmonia Mundi) This new recording of Berg's final completed work is an instant classic, certainly the best version in years. Its excellence is not unexpected, as it brings together one of the most incisive violinists before the public with one of the great Berg conductors and an outstanding orchestra of young instrumentalists. Still, the fearless intensity of Faust's playing of the solo line - listen to the way she tears through the cadenza that opens the second movement - and Abbado's...

BERG, BEETHOVEN: VIOLIN CONCERTOS Isabelle Faust, violin Orchestra Mozart Claudio Abbado (Harmonia Mundi) This new recording of Berg's final completed work is an instant classic, certainly the best version in years. Its excellence is not unexpected, as it brings together one of the most incisive violinists before the public with one of the great Berg conductors and an outstanding orchestra of young instrumentalists. Still, the fearless intensity of Faust's playing of the solo line - listen to the way she tears through the cadenza that opens the second movement - and Abbado's...

SERGEY SCHEPKIN At: Tsai Performance Center, Boston University, Thursday Any performance of the "Goldberg Variations" by Johann Sebastian Bach is a special occasion. Viewed by many as the Mount Everest of the solo keyboard repertoire, this mathematically ingenious set of 30 variations on an aria theme, composed originally in 1741-42 for harpsichord, demands remarkable stamina, intensity, and concentration. To sustain interest and variety throughout a work that runs for around 70 minutes presents a daunting challenge for an orchestra - let alone for a soloist.

SERGEY SCHEPKIN At: Tsai Performance Center, Boston University, Thursday Any performance of the "Goldberg Variations" by Johann Sebastian Bach is a special occasion. Viewed by many as the Mount Everest of the solo keyboard repertoire, this mathematically ingenious set of 30 variations on an aria theme, composed originally in 1741-42 for harpsichord, demands remarkable stamina, intensity, and concentration. To sustain interest and variety throughout a work that runs for around 70 minutes presents a daunting challenge for an orchestra - let alone for a soloist.

NATICK - The indie cellist Matt Haimovitz has a stellar classical pedigree but he enjoys playing Bach, Hendrix, and avant-garde new-music in spaces as far afield as a punk shrine in downtown Manhattan and a pizza parlor in Jackson, Miss. He particularly loves venues where the vibe is informal yet the atmosphere still allows for close listening. So I'm sure he felt right at home in the converted brick firehouse at the Center for Arts in Natick, with its intimate jazz club feel. The venue seats an audience of 290 and is ideally suited for unstuffy chamber music.

BACH: THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS; 1955 PERFORMANCE, ZENPH RE-PERFORMANCE Glenn Gould, piano ( Sony ) When it was pointed out to pianist Glenn Gould that his grunts and sighs distracted from his 1955 landmark set of J. S. Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, he said that if the technology existed to eliminate them, he'd use it. Now it does. Thanks to Zenph Studios of Raleigh, N.C., and Sony, we have the Canadian pianist's famous mono recording without grunts or recording hiss -- and, for the first time, with multichannel separation.

BERLIN -- A previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach has been discovered in a crate of 18th-century birthday cards removed from a German library shortly before it was devastated by fire, researchers said yesterday. Specialists say the aria for soprano and string or keyboard accompaniment composed for a German duke's birthday is the first new music from the composer to surface in three decades. Researcher Michael Maul of the Bach Archiv foundation found the composition, dated October 1713, last month in the eastern city of Weimar.

Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen has long maintained that cultivating ballets by new choreographers is crucial to the art form's development and vitality. With the company's provocative new "Next Generation" program last weekend, Nissinen put his convictions front and center. The program featured three world premieres and one US premiere by choreographers to whom Nissinen gave their first major commissions. And the risk paid off nicely, not just for the art form, but for audiences as well.

NEW YORK - Gustav Leonhardt, the Dutch harpsichordist, organist, and conductor who was a pioneer in the world of period instrument performance and research into Baroque performance styles, died Monday at his home in Amsterdam. He was 83. Both as a keyboard soloist and as the founder and director of the Leonhardt Consort, Mr. Leonhardt made hundreds of recordings that, along with those of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, August Wenzinger, and a handful of others, were the defining discography of the historical performance movement in the 1950s and '60s.

The fast-rising American pianist Jeremy Denk returned to Boston on Sunday, once again with a sprawling keyboard masterpiece in each pocket. His last recital at the Gardner Museum paired Ives’s “Concord’’ Sonata with Beethoven’s magisterial “Hammerklavier’’ (Op. 106). This time it was Ligeti’s fierce Etudes paired with Bach’s sublimely virtuosic “Goldberg’’ Variations. So many recitalists these days mix old and modern music, but few have Denk’s gift for stacking both halves of the deck with works of such iconic grandeur, and then...

NATICK - The indie cellist Matt Haimovitz has a stellar classical pedigree but he enjoys playing Bach, Hendrix, and avant-garde new-music in spaces as far afield as a punk shrine in downtown Manhattan and a pizza parlor in Jackson, Miss. He particularly loves venues where the vibe is informal yet the atmosphere still allows for close listening. So I'm sure he felt right at home in the converted brick firehouse at the Center for Arts in Natick, with its intimate jazz club feel. The venue seats an audience of 290 and is ideally suited for unstuffy chamber music.

Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen has long maintained that cultivating ballets by new choreographers is crucial to the art form's development and vitality. With the company's provocative new "Next Generation" program last weekend, Nissinen put his convictions front and center. The program featured three world premieres and one US premiere by choreographers to whom Nissinen gave their first major commissions. And the risk paid off nicely, not just for the art form, but for audiences as well.

BACH: THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS; 1955 PERFORMANCE, ZENPH RE-PERFORMANCE Glenn Gould, piano ( Sony ) When it was pointed out to pianist Glenn Gould that his grunts and sighs distracted from his 1955 landmark set of J. S. Bach's "Goldberg" Variations, he said that if the technology existed to eliminate them, he'd use it. Now it does. Thanks to Zenph Studios of Raleigh, N.C., and Sony, we have the Canadian pianist's famous mono recording without grunts or recording hiss -- and, for the first time, with multichannel separation.

BERLIN -- A previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach has been discovered in a crate of 18th-century birthday cards removed from a German library shortly before it was devastated by fire, researchers said yesterday. Specialists say the aria for soprano and string or keyboard accompaniment composed for a German duke's birthday is the first new music from the composer to surface in three decades. Researcher Michael Maul of the Bach Archiv foundation found the composition, dated October 1713, last month in the eastern city of Weimar.

Reprinted from early editions of yesterday's Globe. "Tuesdays With Sebastian" is the kind of series that makes Boston's musical life extraordinary. Old friends Peter Sykes and Christa Rakich have teamed up to present the complete keyboard music of J. S. Bach in a series of 34 concerts in various venues across the city. Within a period of two years, they will have performed more than 70 hours of the most demanding and rewarding music ever written for organ and harpsichord. At every concert there is a suggested admission fee of $10, which goes to charity.