LISTENERS preparing for the latest release from the agreeable hot pianist Lang Lang should be advised to sit under an umbrella. He is playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 (Deutsche Grammophon 00289 477 5231), and the performance is so grandly young and indulgent that the notes seem to drip tears. Or is it molasses?

Sample the very opening: tortoise-slow, pendulous pauses between phrases, a universe away from Stephen Hough’s bracing dash on his recent Hyperion set. The star-struck microphone balance of this live performance from Finland makes the piano sound as if it’s under your nose; the orchestra, on the other hand, is far away, perhaps playing in your garden.

Not so far, though, that you never realise the subtleties that Valery Gergiev and his Maryinsky Theatre orchestra bring. None of Gergiev’s frantic rushings here; the tempo of languorous Lang Lang is king. The star pianist’s technique is impeccable, as always; but to live comfortably with this interpretation, packaged with a glittering but too humourless Paganini Rhapsody, you need more generosity of spirit and a sweeter tooth than I seem to possess.

The new disc of 16th-century English consort music, Four Temperaments (Avie AV2054), from the excellent viol group Phantasm, deserves an uncomplicated welcome. True, some confusion is sown by the booklet’s efforts at tagging each composer with one of the “humours”. But music and performances are consistently superb, bathed in the kind acoustic of a Norfolk church.

Pride of place in terms of time goes to an instrumental realisation of Byrd’s four-part Latin Mass — not, I feel, exactly pukka as scholarship, though an excellent way of penetrating the music’s quiet anguish and rapture. But for visceral excitements, Byrd, Tallis and the senior Alfonso Ferrabosco are easily outdistanced by the four samples here of Robert Parsons, a composer who drowned in the River Trent in 1571. The music’s lines become majestically entangled; cadences process without any resolution; solemn musings suddenly switch to a dance or brawl: here is the 17th century’s avant-garde.

Challenging new music of the modern breed arrives on an excellent Warner Classics release pairing Mark-Anthony Turnage with three minutes of George Benjamin and 34 of the German Wolfgang Rihm (2564 60244-2). The recorded sound is exceptional: if Kazushi Ono and the Orchèstre Symphonique de la Monnaie, caught live in Brussels, sound as sumptuous as this, why do we suffer so many pinched recordings from elsewhere? With dazzling sound and polished performances, the music takes on added lustre. Turnage’s tripartite Etudes and Elegies finds a focus and a drive elusive in some past concert performances. Cut and Dissolves, an early Rihm score, offers Expressionist moods in cinematic slivers; while Michael Svodoba’s trombone artistry illuminates the antiphonal theatrics of Canzona per Sonare.

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette