The Classical Music Our Critics Can’t Stop Thinking About

The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.

‘The Brutalist’

In “The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s overwhelmingly ambitious new film, doubters of the architect László Tóth describe a community center he is designing as several buildings crammed into one. You could say the same for the movie, which is about the double-edged American dream, the tail of trauma, post-World War II Jewish life and architecture as metaphor, to list just several themes. And the soundtrack, by the English musician Daniel Blumberg, fascinatingly aspires to nothing less than the sweep of this story.

Blumberg’s soundtrack is inspired by jazz and, more abstractly, the broad slabs of Brutalist architecture, but it also has a stylistic dexterity that matches the several decades of Tóth’s postwar life. Coursing through it all is a four-note theme, of three notes rising and one plunging, which is put through variations of pummeling force, patient tenderness and synth-pop maximalism.

The theme coalesces in the three-part Overture, a sequence of visual poetry seemingly choreographed by Corbet and Blumberg together, so intertwined are the sights and sounds. At first, the music has monumental heft and promise, but as the film continues it turns, like Tóth’s story, Sisyphean: No matter how much the notes rise, they always fall. JOSHUA BARONE

Barbara Hannigan