Michelle Dulak Thomson

The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili takes listeners on a mesmerizing tour of the Soviet and post-Soviet musical landscape, with seraphic stops and sights along the way.

Stunning performances of 13th-century English music are Trio Mediaeval’s latest offering, music so perfectly blended that it almost hurts.

More Brahms is always a good thing, as proven on an impressive new recording by cellist Zuill Bailey and pianist Awadagin Pratt.

A new CD release of Brahms' Ein deutsches Requiem of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, is an often lovely, often puzzling performance — sometimes innocently affectionate, sometimes seeming to be making historical points in a way that aren't necessarily beneficial.

It’s pleasing for a great orchestra to record the standard repertoire; but it’s more exciting, from an audience perspective, for it to record something you’ve not had the opportunity to hear before. The San Francisco Symphony’s recent release is not only an artistic triumph but emblematic of priorities rightly ordered.

Classical musicians don’t ordinarily record “albums” now; they record works. But Musica Pacifica’s Dancing in the Isles is an album.

A new performance can make you re-imagine a piece you thought you'd known cold: Two new discs, by the Pavel Haas and Artemis Quartets, remind me of that. And what the two groups share is extraordinary technical crispness coupled with tenderness and intelligence; the ability to refresh and renew.

It’s not often that we get to hear such a large body of new music, developed over a long time, by one composer and played by a single ensemble. No one could listen to Lisa Bielawa's two-CD set and not marvel.

By design, chamber music can be performed anywhere. Bay Area musicians like to perform it everywhere. Here, SFCV’s premier chamber music maven takes on the task of winnowing down this gorgeous superfluity to just five (well, and a few more) hot tickets you can’t afford to miss.

Composer Rodolphe Kreutzer — pretty much off the public’s radar, but very much on the violin student’s — is brought to life in a fantastic CD by Axel Strauss thanks to his incredible nimbleness in both hands and one utterly lovely cantabile.