Best of Music

Paul Simon: The Rhythm of the Saints (Warner Bros.). Intricate Brazilian rhythms; complex, inward-looking lyrics. And something else too: good fun.

Beethoven: "Diabelli" Variations, Alfred Brendel, piano (Philips). The publisher asked Beethoven for one variation of a simple little waltz tune; he wrote 33, and a masterpiece. Brendel performs with style and insight, verve and elan.

Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (Columbia). This isn't just music; it's American mythology, recorded in the mid-1930s and brought alive for the first time on two CDs. The blues found no deeper mystical expression than in Johnson's composing and singing.

Carlene Carter: I Fell in Love (Reprise). A world-beater album sung by a woman whose voice, with its leathery delicacy, can handle tunes of hard traveling and wrong-turn loving with equal finesse. If country music is still a man's game, Carter is effortlessly bending the rules.

The Complete Caruso (RCA Victor). The master's voice: Enrico Caruso's matchless discography (1902-20), now released on 12 CDs. At home in everything from Puccini arias to George M. Cohan's Over There, Caruso continues to be revered, rightly, as the greatest Italian tenor who ever lived.

Frank Sinatra: The Capitol Years (Capitol); The Reprise Collection (Reprise). Does popular singing get any better than what is represented in these two editions? The first (three CDs, 75 songs) spans 1953-62; the second (four CDs, 81 songs), 1960-86.

Brahms: The Three Violin Sonatas, Itzhak Perlman, violin; Daniel Barenboim, piano (Sony Classical). There are half a dozen or so great sonatas for violin and piano; Brahms wrote three of them. Perlman and Barenboim -- the latter back at the keyboard, where he belongs -- give them robust yet sensitive readings.

Charles Mingus: Epitaph (Columbia). Composer-musicologist Gunther Schuller leads an all-star big band in a definitive live performance of the monumental suite -- raw, raucous and richly textured -- by a pioneer figure of modern jazz.

Tchaikovsky and Verdi Arias, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone; Valery Gergiev conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic (Philips). Hvorostovsky, 28, has a voice that is big, rich and -- most important -- silky smooth. There hasn't been a baritone with this force and allure since the young Hermann Prey.

The All-American Music of Irving Berlin, Dwight Thomas at the Paramount Wurlitzer Organ (Newport Classic). Even on this unlikely instrument, Berlin's melodic invention -- from the infectious Puttin' on the Ritz to the tender Always -- is nonpareil. The sleeper of the year.