Haa Jon Chang

“How often do we step back and realize what a gift it is to have this music in our life?” asks acclaimed trumpeter, composer and Greenleaf Music founder Dave Douglas. On Gifts, his newest Greenleaf project, Douglas harnesses that feeling of simple wonder with a new book of pieces and four intriguing takes on Strayhorn songs, premiering a new quartet with poll-sweeping tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and two members of the Oscar-nominated post-rock trio Son Lux: guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The sound is harmonically spacious, with no bass, but a full, sonically adventurous guitar palette from Bhatia that frames the group’s trumpet-tenor melodic concept in fresh and unexpected ways.

As part of the Royal Academy of Music Bicentenary Series, violinist Anna Im has compiled a tender programme that includes Fauré’s Violin Sonata No. 1 and Amy Beach’s Romance. Entitled Rêverie , the album fosters feelings and memories from imaginary worlds: Fauré’s sonata weaves a tapestry of emotions that transcends time and space; Beach’s Romance is a tribute to love which conjures up bittersweet memories. For this recording, Anna was graciously loaned the ‘Maurin’ Stradivari violin.

Young cellist Han-Na Chang, Korean-born and trained in the U.S. by Mstislav Rostropovich, is a newcomer to Baroque music, having released a mixture of cello classics and late-Romantic and contemporary concertos up to this time. Here she delivers a set of seven Vivaldi cello concertos that Rostropovich himself might have helped her shape; it's something of a throwback to the way Vivaldi was played 30 or 40 years ago.

This is a fine recording of two vastly under-appreciated works by young cello virtuoso Han-Na Chang. She has the extraordinary technique to play the excruciatingly difficult cadenza in the central movement of the Sinfonia Concertante and the sustained tone to play the long, lyrical melodies in the opening movement of the cello sonata. Antonio Pappano is a faithful accompanist whether he's directing the London Symphony Orchestra in the Sinfonia Concertante or playing the piano in the cello sonata.

Sarah Chang's new CD of two of the most flavorful Violin Concerti to come out of 20th-century Russia is a winner. The first movement of the Shostakovich finds Chang playing, at first, with no vibrato, and the effect is haunting and as properly spooky as the composer wanted. Her many levels of both dynamics and vibrato are very much on display throughout, and in the Scherzo, she builds to a wonderfully maniacal climax.

This 2005 recording of Han-Na Chang performing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 and Cello Sonata is a follow-up to her 2003 recording of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto and Cello Sonata. In both cases, Chang is accompanied by Antonio Pappano either leading the London Symphony Orchestra or playing the piano. As on the earlier disc, Chang is primarily a soloist with a strong arm and a dazzling technique, and her performances sparkle with energy and twinkle with enthusiasm.