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Listeners can play a role in the recovery, as well. For more than twenty years, since Napster gave people the idea that music should be free for the taking, a radical devaluation of musicians’ work has been under way. Spotify and other streaming services have perpetuated and normalized that iniquity: the royalties they offer to non-superstar musicians are insultingly small. It was all the more welcome, then, when, beginning in mid-March, the enlightened music site Bandcamp began running a series of altruistic sales, the proceeds of which went directly to artists. It’s also worth bearing in mind that streaming music is more destructive to the environment than any technology of musical reproduction that has come before.…
Notable Recordings of 2020
“Debussy Rameau”; Víkingur Ólafsson (Deutsche Grammophon)
Liza Lim, “Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus”; Peter Rundel and Stefan Asbury conducting the Klangforum Wien, with Sophie Schafleitner and Lorelei Dowling (Kairos)
Ethel Smyth, “The Prison”; James Blachly conducting the Experiential Orchestra, with Sarah Brailey and Dashon Burton (Chandos)
“Experiments in Living”: Music of Brahms, Schoenberg, Crawford Seeger, Pluta, Cheung, Charmaine Lee, George Lewis; Spektral Quartet, with Claire Chase (New Focus)
Adès, Piano Concerto, “Totentanz”; Adès conducting the Boston Symphony, with Kirill Gerstein, Mark Stone, Christianne Stotijn (Deutsche Grammophon)
Timothy McCormack, “karst”; Klangforum Wien (Kairos)
Beethoven, Complete String Quartets; Quatuor Ébène (Erato)
Sarah Hennies, “Spectral Malsconcities,” “Unsettle”; Bearthoven, Bent Duo (New World)
Du Yun, “A Cockroach’s Tarantella”; Du Yun, JACK Quartet (Modern Sky)
Linda Catlin Smith, “Meadow”; Mia Cooper, Joachim Roewer, Bill Butt (Louth Contemporary Music Society)