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August 22, 2025
5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now
The American mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor has long made Debussy’s “Trois Chansons de Bilitis,” set to Pierre Louÿs’s pseudo-antique verses masquerading as Sappho, a calling card on the recital stage. Her voluptuous mezzo suits their playful eroticism, her tone by turns airy and sumptuous. Here she records them for the first time, placing their languid sensuality in dialogue with songs spanning 150 years: Robert Spano’s recent “Sonnets to Orpheus,” George Crumb’s youthful “Three Early Songs” and Edvard Grieg’s “Haugtussa.” The result is a searching meditation on nature and love refracted through the lens of myth.
In Spano’s affectionate settings of Rilke, her inky low register comes into its own, even as her German diction is sometimes distractingly accented. Her dramatic conviction animates the shimmering ambiguities of Rilke’s metaphysical riddles, especially in “Breath, you invisible poem,” in which radiant stillness gives way to ecstatic rhythmic excitement. Grieg’s song cycle “Haugtussa,” about the visions and heartbreak of an infatuated young girl, comes alive with rustic warmth in O’Connor’s tender reading. Crumb’s three early songs, written when he was a teenager, are rendered with hypnotic simplicity. Throughout, Spano proves an alert partner at the piano, shaping textures that shimmer, sigh and sustain O’Connor’s eloquent artistry.
CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM