CC recommends: Classical music

Stile Antico, Puer natus est. A glorious program of Advent and Christmas music by a fast-rising group of young British singers. The backbone of the program, as the erudite notes by choir member Matthew O'Donovan explain, is the magnificent (though incomplete) mass by Thomas Tallis, Puer natus est, which is built on the plainchant by that name. Sections of the mass are interspersed imaginatively with other music from the Tudor period by John Taverner, William Byrd, Robert White and John Sheppard, and with the plainchant itself. The voices are clear and superbly balanced in a wonderful acoustic caught in the Super Audio format, though playable as a standard CD as well.

Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 29, 31, 32, 35, 36 and 38–41. Mackerras died this year, and these separate two-disk sets of late Mozart symphonies, succeeding an earlier fine set with the Prague Chamber Orchestra (Telarc), are a tribute to his eminence. Using modern instruments, with their power and brilliance, but also mindful of the lessons to be learned from period instruments and practice, he offers recordings with the crack Scottish Chamber Orchestra that are clean, bracing and full of insight.

Paul Lewis, Beethoven: Complete Piano Concertos. Lewis's celebrated traversal of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas is now joined by his set (with Jiři Bĕlohlávek) of the five piano concertos. Though he has technique aplenty, Lewis (a protégé of Alfred Bren­del) is not a self-indulgent, showy pianist but a deeply thoughtful musician. As he said in an interview, he wanted to let the music speak for itself. And speak it does, with pianist and conductor in vital and felicitous rapport. Listen, for example, to the rapt and expectant interplay between piano and timpani before the close of the final concerto, the "Emperor." These recordings do not replace the many notable sets in the past, dating back to the legendary accounts by Artur Schnabel and Sir Malcolm Sargent in the 1930s (still available), but they belong in the highest rank.

Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, Winterreise. The Romantics had a love affair with the twin themes of love and death. No­where in music is this terrain more grippingly explored than in Schubert's desolating Winterreise ("Winter Jour­ney"), tracing the steps of a forlorn wanderer over a winter landscape of unrequited love. Padmore sings with great pathos and drama, but in Schubert's songs the piano is never mere accompaniment, and the wonderful in­sights of Lewis are not to be missed.