Avant-garde

The players showed consummate skill in Beethoven's final string quartet and virtuosic enthusiasm in new music from Jeff Scott.

Rush in high fidelity, Matt B with the London Phil, dancing with DJ Danny Trance, chill string trios, and more.

In the music on composer David Bird's new album, the hardness and coldness of actual metal seem almost literally audible.

"While the world is waiting for the UFC Freedom 250 on June 14 at the White House, I challenge President Putin to a cage match," says Pussy Riot.

A work like this asks us to exercise our patience, something in short supply these days – to listen closely to a spread of sound over time without imposing expectations on it.

The man-machine duality of a soloist performing alongside a recording has what in the pre-robotic, pre-AI age we might have called a futuristic quality. Today it touches on the "uncanny valley" effect.

The Taiwan Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble and Taiwu Ballads Troupe vocal ensemble unveiled a panoply of fascinating, mostly Taiwan-rooted music that incorporated Western classical, contemporary avant-garde, and Indigenous music.

Sometimes musicians create an atypical instrument combination simply because they have similar tastes or just like working together. Not so here – there's no sense of anything forced, or absent.

The placement of the different instruments in the listener's ears creates a sense of surrounding space; the bleed of one tone's decay into the attack of the next seems to smooth over the passage of time.

Despite the presence of Stravinsky's 'Firebird,' it was a large new work by Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Reid that proved the program's creative centerpiece.