5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

‘Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1’

Cuarteto Casals (Harmonia Mundi)

We are spoiled with great recordings of the Shostakovich string quartets, so you might wonder why we need yet another set. It wasn’t until I began listening to these recordings by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals, though, that it dawned on me how similar the playing of most other groups is: biting and hard-edged, bows digging into the strings. Of course, this is part of the music. It’s difficult to imagine even the earliest of Shostakovich’s quartets without some grit in the sound.

But one of the key features of these performances is the Casals’s use of a lighter, more transparent touch in Shostakovich’s first five quartets, for the group’s first installment in a planned cycle of all 15. These players let this music breathe a bit, and the results are bracing: Shostakovich’s melodies have a lyricism absent from many performances, the rhythms are springier, and his hammered-out chords sound like actual chords rather than blunt, percussive noise.

There is some loss of energy and intensity in the first two quartets, but, beginning with the Third, the Casals manages to hold spaciousness and intensity in a delicate balance. This isn’t how I’d want to hear Shostakovich every time, but the Casals should be commended for leaving a different aesthetic and emotional imprint. It should be fascinating to hear what they do with the remaining quartets. DAVID WEININGER

‘Meciendo’

The Crossing; Donald Nally, director (Navona)

A recent live performance by the Crossing prompted me to try, and fail, to fully catch up with this vocal ensemble’s abundance of recordings. “Meciendo” — compact, at 28 minutes — is the fourth of what will be five albums it has released this year. (Another, “Ochre,” was just nominated for a Grammy; it is named for a shining work by Caroline Shaw, but is most notable for George E. Lewis’s sly “A Cluster of Instincts,” with hissed sibilants and urgent murmurs.)