Avant-garde

One of this music's most interesting characteristics is a seamless fusion of acoustic and electronic sound.

If alternate tuning systems are new to you, this album will be an introduction more musical than pedagogic, and nonetheless revealing. If not, it will be easy to admire Thornock's ingenuity and talent.

Yugoslav-Israeli intellectual and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana may be best known for his insistence that a people must leave the traumas of the past behind in order to thrive. With 'Que sais-je?' Amos Elkana, Yehuda's son, has created a profound portrait in music of his father.

Aucoin's vision asserts itself from the first touch of the first movement's mysterious music, with fluttering melodies from angsty high-pitched woodwinds and metallic percussion strokes.

'River Spirits' by Susan Botti lives up to its dual billings as a 'theatrical motet' and a 'futuristic abstract fable.'

The language comes not from notes and rhythms but the physical parameters of how an instrument is played.

Exceptet's debut album explores the sonic possibilities of a lineup inspired by Stravinsky, with music by Katherine Balch, Paul Kerekes and Sarah Goldfeather.

In all these works, played magnificently by Jing Yang, Vigeland makes conscious and effective use of the piano's acoustical properties to create sound worlds that couldn't exist in the same way if played by orchestral instruments.

When is an improvisation more than an improvisation? When a spontaneous collaboration gels into something that's more the sum of its parts.

A classical-music supergroup? That's the Principal Brothers: four Black principal (first-chair) woodwind players, who joined forces for a chamber concert with music from Bach to new works written for them.