• CDs: Emma Kirkby with Christopher Hogwood and others: Purcell: Songs & Airs
• William Christie/Les Arts Florissants: Purcell: Harmonia Sacra (Divine Hymns)

I'll bet you think I'm going to talk about Cecilia Bartoli, whose brilliant new CD, Maria: Bel Canto Arias, is a Buyer's Choice. Guess again!

It's late November, when my thoughts turn not so lightly to English composers. And I've been a bad blogger. The 22nd of November was both Benjamin Britten's birthday and the feast of Saint Cecilia, patroness of music, and I did nothing to mark either occasion (well, nothing aside from eating too much). Worse still, I can't rectify the situation by showcasing a hot new recording of Britten music this week.

I can almost make up for it by giving a shout-out for two newly available albums of works by another English composer, Henry Purcell, forever linked to Britten in one sense and another. Among their connections: both men composed music in honor of Saint Cecilia.

The first album, by Les Arts Florissants, is a reflective but not at all dour performance of hymns from Purcell and his contemporaries John Blow, William Croft, and Pelham Humfrey.

For those of you who think "hymn" is the musical equivalent of "grim," think again. Of course I'm prejudiced, as I listen to the shape-note hymns of William Billings for fun. But if you are any sort of classical music listener, you'll have a hard time keeping spiritually oriented compositions off your play list.

And Harmonia Sacra possesses an intimacy and a tenderness that may surprise those who expect their baroque music to be brisk and/or booming. These are cries and whispers straight from the human soul. Listen to the soprano soloist in Purcell's "Tell me, some pitying angel" -- what delicate, lovely performance.

The instrumental accompaniment -- harpischord, organ, viola da gamba, theorbo -- is equally restrained, setting off the vocals but not overwhelming them. That's conductor William Christie playing the organ and harpischord.

The second Purcell selection, Songs & Airs, is in a distinctly different mood. This is secular music, often tinged with melancholy, though some of it is quite earthy, in the conceit-laden manner of the poets. "When first Amintas sued for a kiss" even recalls that perennial line "Your lips say no, no, no, but your eyes say yes, yes, yes." There really is no new thing under the sun.

And that radiant voice of early music, Emma Kirkby -- ahem, Dame Emma, as of this year -- is on hand to interpret the texts in Purcell 's settings. You likely know Kirkby from an extensive catalog of recordings and a career in which she has covered material from the medieval era to the 20th century. In fact, I would note that her output is bookended by female composers on either end: the German abbess Hildegard von Bingen and the American Amy Beach.

Kirkby's voice is unmistakable to lovers of early music: that chaste, vibrato-free soprano. One reviewer called it "boyish," but I find that wide of the mark. Kirkby's voice captures both youthfulness and femininity, and it's definitely for grown-ups.

This Purcell album of hers, Songs & Airs, is actually a L'Oiseau Lyre reissue, just out this month, of a recording Kirkby made in 1982. Distinguished early music colleagues are on hand to provide accompaniment: Christopher Hogwood on organ and spinet, Anthony Rooley playing the lute, Catherine Mackintosh on violin, and Richard Campbell on viola da gamba.

As with the Christie recording above, this is baroque on a smaller, intimate scale, stripped down to a pure voice and a well-chosen ensemble of accompanists. It is as lovely as anything you'll hear in this wistful season, and you'll be just as ready to listen again when spring returns to the Earth.

CD: Gil Shaham with Lan Shui/Singapore Symphony Orchestra: Chen and He: The Butterfly Lovers; Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

Back in the day, several members of the Bethesda classical music mob, a rotating cast of singers, musicians, and other enthusiasts, informally adopted the slogan "Gil's our guy" in promoting recordings from the young violinist Gil Shaham. Privately I called it "Paying for Gil's Strad" but couldn't tell you if we succeeded.

But our devotion was honest enough and, in my eyes, richly deserved. People do get rather militant about their pianists, fiddlers, and cellists, after all. There's lots of love to go around for Joshua Bell and Hilary Hahn, for example, and you have your Heifetz partisans. Then there's the friend of mine who won't bother to listen to any fiddler who isn't Itzhak Perlman.

Those of us in the Gil Shaham camp were very taken with his musicality, sensitivity, and that vibrant artistry. It wasn't just the repertoire, though that certainly had its appeal. Just reading the list of recordings on Deutsche Grammophon makes you want to lie down: the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky violin concertos; Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time; Bartok, Brahms, Paganini; intimate little arrangements of Dvorak and Schubert; the usual array of romances; transcriptions from opera. Among the landmark works was Shaham's recording of both the Barber and Korngold violin concertos, along that suite from Much Ado about Nothing that has since won a place on classical radio play lists.

Granted, in some respects it wasn't your average career. Does anyone else remember Shaham's version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the Weather Channel? Then there was the inclusion of "A Transylvanian Lullaby" from Young Frankenstein on Shaham's Devil's Dance album of some years back. It's beautifully played, yes, but it does summon up images of Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, and Peter Boyle. Maybe that's just what Shaham, by all reports a nice, unpretentious guy, had in mind.

So where did we get a man like this? By way of Urbana, Illinois, and Jerusalem, as it happens. Gil Shaham was born in the States but brought up both here and in Israel, and has since claimed New York City as his home. His studies took him both to Juilliard and Jerusalem, as well as Columbia University.

He displayed musical talent early but was apparently spared the competition route during his childhood. But the now legendary account of the teenaged Shaham being pulled out of high school to ride to the rescue when the London Symphony Orchestra needed a replacement for an ailing Itzhak Perlman is apparently true.

Did that mean "Kid, you're going out there a youngster but coming back a star"? Does it matter now? We have this library of diverse Shaham recordings, plus his active concert schedule, with more to come.

Still, even with Shaham's intriguing choices, I didn't see The Butterfly Lovers coming, though I'm glad he took it on. His recording with Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra has only just been released on his own label, Canary Classics, packaged with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.

I can hear you now: "Say what?" Well, read the liner notes by Ken Smith, which not only make a good read but address the philosophy behind pairing the Tchaikovsky with Chen and He's composition. And if you want political and cultural repercussions of the latter work, you've come to the right place, because Smith gets into that as well. Just imagine living in a culture where classical musicians and composers run afoul of the authorities, which has happened more often than you might think.

I think you'll enjoy The Butterfly Lovers, a melding of the Western violin, orchestra, and tonal system with Chinese melodies, themes, and musical techniques. Next to the Yellow River Concerto, it's one of the few pieces of Chinese music familiar to Western audiences, and one of the more accessible ones. It is, however, rare that a Western violinist would take it on.

Shaham had performed the work with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra several years back, and to my ear he seems at ease with this bittersweet, sometimes delicate composition. Perhaps that's a reflection of the sensitivity and versatility that has marked his career to date.

At this writing, we can expect Gil Shaham and his sister, the classical pianist Orli Shaham, to perform at the Strathmore in Bethesda on February 8th, 2008. See you there.

CD: Simon Keenlyside with Ulf Schirmer/Munich Radio Orchestra: Tales of Opera

When I was perhaps 12 or so, I attended one of those mother-daughter church banquets at which the men are enlisted to perform KP and the women and girls for once are fed and entertained. That evening's entertainment was a barbershop quartet, and aside from their rendition of "Last Night on the Back Porch," the memory that stayed with me was the baritone's rueful observation that the tenor and bass got all the fun parts and he was left with, as he put it, the garbage pit. My natural empathy for underdogs has kept that memory with me all these years, and it's quite possibly the source of my fascination with the baritone voice.

So let's have a tip of the hat to all baritones, past and present, the celebrated and the obscure, the obvious ones and the stealth singers. We all acknowledge the recently departed baritone Robert Goulet, for instance, whose recording of Camelot spent a lot of time spinning on our hi-fi during my childhood, but how many of us remember that the overachieving Placido Domingo started out a baritone and indeed has announced plans to revisit that range when he takes the lead in Simon Boccanegra?

In that spirit, let us consider the new recital disc by the lyric baritone Simon Keenlyside. Tales of Opera has been out in Europe for some time but Sony has only just released it stateside. This CD has, however, been collecting awards and accolades from various sources, and ought to win Keenlyside some well-deserved attention from American listeners.

So where has this guy been all your life? The London-born Keenlyside was first a boy treble, later a singer of lieder, and only wound up on the opera stage when he was in his late 20s. The profiles I've read suggest he approached his voice training with perspective and moderation, perhaps in part due to his childhood as a chorister.

Over the years he has appeared on the opera stage in Europe and the United States, playing a varied baritone repertoire -- Count Almaviva, Danilo, Figaro, Belcore, Marcello, Billy Budd -- and also creating roles in new operas by Thomas Ades and Lorin Maazel.

Those of you who watch Classic Arts Showcase may well have caught the video of Keenlyside singing "Estuans interius" ("Burning Inside") -- on a train, no less -- from that Deutsche Grammophon recording of Carmina Burana with Christian Thielemann. Keenlyside also joined the indefatigable Bryn Terfel for some duets on the Simple Gifts CD from two years ago.

If you haven't had a chance to see him onstage, on TV, or even on YouTube (quite a few treasures there), lend an ear to this very tempting recital collection. There's a nice balance of roles, themes, composers, and moods. Keenlyside is, by turns, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Wagner's Wolfram, Tchaikovsky's Yeletsky, and Figaro in the Rossini incarnation. He sings in four languages, though not his native English, and if he devotes three tracks apiece to Mozart and Verdi, he also works in Cilea, Massenet, and Thomas.

Keenlyside has a pleasing lyric baritone and brings a decided emotional resonance to each part, and judging by the footage I've seen, he's definitely of the breed of singers who are as adept at both the acting and vocal demands of performing. He's up to playing comic relief, even if his Papageno comes off a bit intense here (then again, Papageno always was a hot and bothered guy), but really shines at the subtler passages. Just listen to what he does with Germont, for instance, or Hamlet.

Keenlyside has expressed an interest in moving on to roles such as Rigoletto, though a glance at his schedule indicates that in the immediate future we can expect to hear a lot more of him as Don Giovanni and the Marquis Posa, in addition to his performances of a varied repertoire consisting everything from Brahms to Butterworth. Clearly he's more a guiding star than a meteor, and deserves our attention as we look towards the singers who dot the night sky.

CD: Davies/Lyric Opera of Chicago: Bolcom: A View from the Bridge

It looks as though fall has finally arrived, and you know what that means: we're launching another heady season of concerts, recitals, musicals, and operas. You still have time to catch a requiem for All Souls Day, yes, even this week, and perhaps you could start mulling over which concerts and singalongs you'll catch later in the season.

And opera season is in full swing too, offering with it a bona fide Washington premiere of a truly American opera: William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge, at the Kennedy Center until just November 17th.

My exposure to 20th century opera has been pathetically limited, but I had my heart set on properly hearing A View from a Bridge. This most American of operas features a libretto by Arthur Miller and Arnold Weinstein, and Bolcom's genre-sampling score. Would you believe an opera with doo-wop passage? I kid you not.

That said, we are in emotionally and musically demanding territory here. The story is set in 1950s Brooklyn, amid the Italian-American community, and concerns the tensions, jealousies, and betrayals churning within one particular family -- themes familiar enough to anyone who's heard Puccini or Verdi, or read a lot of classic European drama.

The current Washington National Opera production, starring Kim Josephson (Eddie Carbone), Catherine Malfitano (Beatrice Carbone), and Gregory Turay (Rodolfo) from the Chicago premiere, was, to my thinking, a must-see. But through an embarrassing mix-up (and nothing to do with the end of Daylight Savings Time, either), I arrived at the Kennedy Center when Saturday's performance of A View from the Bridge was already in progress and my only recourse was to peer through a forest of latecomers. The opera glasses were a help. My height was not.

Believe me, I shed a few tears when I realized I had inadvertently missed the initial scenes of the opera, but then Gregory Turay, as the immigrant Rodolfo, sang "New York Lights" and brought on tears of a different sort. I've been hearing about "New York Lights" (AKA "I Love the Beauty of the View at Home") for some time and wanted to catch this paean to the city where so many of my own immigrant relatives first set foot. I was not disappointed, from the opening notes of Bolcom's theme to Turay's hushed and delicate conclusion to the aria. It's a transcendent moment.

But if Turay has that sunny, golden tenor that is everything an opera composer dreams of, it's Kim Josephson (baritone) and Catherine Malfitano (soprano) who break your heart as a long-married couple confronting some painful truths. At the center of their story is their orphaned niece (a fine Christine Brandes), who has just come of age and unwittingly provokes a rivalry among the men of the household. All this unfolds beneath the gaze of a watchful chorus, which utters commentary and warnings like some collective conscience, its very presence invoking myriad stories of New York immigrants. Immigrants, New York, and tragedy -- themes dear to my heart, in one form or another.

If you are unable to attend any of the performances this month, or would like to relive one, New World Records offers A View from the Bridge in a two-disc set. The recording not only features Josephson, Malfitano, and Turay in the roles they created for the American premiere, but preserves the work's essential drama. Affecting too is Timothy Nolen (baritone), who, as Alfieri, must narrate this tale of the slow unveiling of a family's secrets.

Musically, it's quite a journey. The dissonant cries of domestic drama are interspersed with playful or lyrical moments -- with Eddie's doo-wop-singing buddies, for example, or Rodolfo's so-called jazz rendition of "Paper Doll," which seems like the encore the Three Tenors forgot to do. But whatever beauty, humor, or harshness the opera explores, it's the fiery, fierce, vulnerable Josephson, partnered with Malfitano, who remains at its heart.