Brooklyn Rider’s audacious interpretation of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, will draw disappointed frowns from classical purists. Which is one great reason to purchase the quartet’s third album, Seven Steps.

Ghostly Psalms would be best delivered by a 50-foot-tall orchestrion, plopped in the center of the city, not by CD. The exemplary recording and production give that impression anyway. From the opening herald of a conch shell onward, listeners will find the walls swelling outward.

London Philharmonic Orchestra
The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music (X5 Music Group)

The expected fare—Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and the rest—finds the London Philharmonic Orchestra buried in a bass-dominated mix and excessive reverb. While much of the playing is passable, as in Vivaldi’s “Spring (Allegro)” from Four Seasons, the lack of rhythmic flexibility nearly conjures an audible metronome click. “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music”? Lies! They are not. The LPO finds one measly post–World War II piece throughout the four-disc set, Stanley Myers’s “Cavatina” (famously used in The Deer Hunter), and the entire catalogs of Shostakovich, Berg and Bartók are inexplicably absent.

Gidon Kremer made a few enemies with his recent indictment of the damaging culture of celebrity at the Verbier Festival. In a letter explaining his withdrawal from the Swiss event, Kremer declared the new breed of performers “quite EMPTY and artistically lost, chasing a hunger for recognition.” Embracing talent over marketability for his own roster, the violinist’s Lockenhaus Festival is a bolster to his argument. Luckily for those unable to attend the annual concerts in Austria, ECM New Series founder Manfred Eicher began capturing the superlative performances soon after the Lockenhaus’s inception in 1981. This essential five-disc box collects material recorded between 1981 and 1986.

From string quartet Amiina to electronic conjurer Ben Frost, much of our favorite music has emerged from Iceland in recent years. The latest from the island, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s debut, Rhízoma, plays like a field recording of the wrinkled crevasses of the cerebral cortex. Structured yet transcendent of bar lines, the scores wander introspectively through a vast spatial plane, as though pivoting the eyes back into the skull.

Not since Lara St. John wore her violin as a bra on Bach Works for Violin has there been such a public kerfuffle over classical cover art as with Steve Reich’s latest, WTC 9/11 / Mallet Quartet / Dance Patterns. The image of the second plane hitting the towers was replaced after the uproar.

The initial chord of Trinity Requiem’s “Introit” is full of Herculean power. Demanding the attention of the listener, it plummets into a cello choir deep in wide, dramatic vibrato before introducing the stars of the album, the Trinity Youth Chorus.

Music collectors are suckers for creative album packaging, and with Timber, composer Michael Gordon has a winner. It comes entombed in medium-density fiberboard, laser-etched with a starburst of 3-D planks. Thankfully, the Bang on a Can cofounder’s latest is as musically compelling as its mantel-ready wooden case.

Chicago audiences are accustomed to seeing Greenberg’s dome onstage at the MCA with the International Contemporary Ensemble. Yet Greenberg’s impressive keyboard prowess extends far beyond the labyrinths of a George Crumb score or the intricate weavings of Varèse. For his latest album, the Northwestern grad steps into the age of piano grandmasters Robert Schumann and Ferruccio Busoni for a more tonal exploration of interiors and exteriors.