5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

Sibelius and Prokofiev: Violin Concertos

Janine Jansen, violin; Oslo Philharmonic; Klaus Mäkelä, conductor (Decca)

While the 28-year-old conductor Klaus Mäkelä makes an impact both polished and visceral in the concert hall, the recordings he’s put out thus far in his meteoric career haven’t shown him to his best advantage. There has been blunt, inert Stravinsky with the Orchestre de Paris and a politely listless cycle of Sibelius symphonies with the Oslo Philharmonic. (He will soon depart those ensembles to lead starrier ones: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)

Now, for the first time, the focus of one of his albums is not squarely on him, and it’s the best of the middling bunch. The violinist Janine Jansen stays in the spotlight in concertos by Sibelius and Prokofiev (his First) with Mäkelä and the Oslo orchestra. Without ever seeming indulgent, Jansen can be alternately wispily delicate and thrillingly forceful, but always songful and human. In the Prokofiev, she’s just the right mixture of playful and sinister, and suavely intimate in the urbane third movement. The players sound excellent, led by Mäkelä with a kind of passionate moderation, an effectively reined-in fire. The grandeur of the Sibelius concerto’s finale builds steadily, and the end of the Prokofiev’s first movement has the candied atmosphere of a fairy tale. ZACHARY WOOLFE

Vijay Iyer: ‘Trouble’

Jennifer Koh, violin; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor (BMOP/sound)

The pianist Vijay Iyer, an acclaimed figure in improvised music, also composes works “around” the classical tradition, as he puts it in the notes for this first recorded collection of his orchestral music. There is nothing programmatic or explicitly political, but all the pieces reflect, in some way, the tensions of the era in which they were created, from 2017 to 2019.

The largest work is the half-hour “Trouble,” for violin and orchestra, written for the brilliant Jennifer Koh. It can be heard as a meditation on the relationship of individual to collective: Unlike a traditional concerto, Koh’s nuanced and highly varied sound spinning into and away from a spacious orchestral texture. There is a collective sense of mourning in the third movement, an agonizing memorial for Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man murdered in Detroit in 1982. And in the long, final movement, “Assembly,” various musical strands come together — at first uncertainly, but ultimately in triumph.