A bin of CDs.(Music)

LET's touch briefly on some recent recordings, taking in composers--contemporary composers--violinists, pianists, and singers. We'll conclude with an oddball CD (not that there won't be some oddness in the meantime).

First come the composers, the most important musicians of all. Augusta Read Thomas is busy and honored. Forty years old, this American is composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, meaning that she has written several pieces for them. Early this season, however, the New York Philharmonic premiered a Thomas work, Gathering Paradise for soprano and orchestra, on texts of Emily Dickinson. (Virtually every American composer sets Dickinson, much as English composers have always set Shakespeare.)

Thomas likes playing with texts, and she plays with a slew of them on a new CD that includes In My Sky at Twilight. Also on this disc (from ARTCD) is ... Words of the Sea ..., a purely orchestral work, but inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West." Thomas is a skilled craftsman, no matter what you think of what she produces. Her intelligence and ability are not in doubt; we can disagree on her level of musical inspiration.

Like much of her music, ... Words of the Sea ... seems to be telling you something, insistently. It is demanding that you both listen and think. Its final movement is dubbed "Homage to Debussy," referring to the composer who wrote one of the greatest sea pieces of all, La Mer.

In My Sky at Twilight--for soprano and chamber orchestra--includes no fewer than 16 texts, one after the other. Thomas takes snippets from all sorts of writers, so that a 9th-century Japanese scribe (Ono no Komachi) is followed by Robert Browning, and Sappho precedes e. e. cummings, and so on. Thomas also has the wit to include one of the most striking and settable lines in all of poetry, from Christina Rossetti: "Pulse for pulse, breath for breath."

She writes in a familiar language of today, Thomas does, full of anxiety, jumpiness, and irresolution. Agreat deal of contemporary music seems a sci-fi or horror soundtrack. But Thomas has something to say, and should not be ignored.

Arvo Part, the Estonian master, has not been ignored for decades, enjoying a place as one of the "holy minimalists" (composers of a spiritual bent who write in the style of minimalism). A new CD from Virgin Classics, however, catches him before minimalism, before, if you will, he became Arvo Part. This CD includes Pro et contra, a cello concerto from 1966, played by Truls Mork, the superb Norwegian. And what is this concerto "For and against"? Tonality, seems to be the question. Or, more broadly, the old way (or older ways).