The Compact Collection

Rob Cowan on the week's best CD releases

First, he sent J S Bach among rockers, jazzers and avant-gardists. Goldberg's Variations didn't know what had hit them! Now, Uri Caine turns his attentions to the Goldbergs' greatest successor, 33 variations that Beethoven composed on a trite but charming waltz by Antonio Diabelli. But there's a difference. For a start, Beethoven's variations pushed the limits of harmonic and rhythmic propriety even more forcefully than Bach's had done some 80 years earlier: so much so that even Caine has his work cut out matching them. Take the ninth Variation, originally a peasant dance with a raspberry blown in virtually every bar. Caine initially follows Beethoven's lead, except that he shares the material between his own fortepiano and the period-instrument players of Concerto Köln. He digresses on a breeze then canters off, again more or less as written, for the start of Variation 11, a Presto.

The cleverest aspect of this recreation is its close proximity to Beethoven's spirit, a next phase in the joke you might say, as with the witty hesitations of Variation 13, or the frantic scampering of 15, or the brilliant way he distorts the descending figurations at the start of 17. There's never a Beethovenian quip that Caine doesn't "get", extend or use as a springboard for further fun. But while initially I thought that, as with his Goldberg Variations, he would leave the score's solemn core untouched (in this case, the Largo of Variation 31), what he actually does is combine straight reportage and extemporisation, while the orchestra stays silent. So there's reverence, too, tucked in among all the ceaseless creativity. If you love the Diabellis, you simply have to hear it. And if you don't as yet know their mysteries, you won't be straying too much from the truth by taking Caine as your first lead.

Some have named Frederic Rzewski's epic The People United Will Never be Defeated a sort of "Diabellis for Today". The theme (a Chilean anti-fascist protest song) is similarly catchy, and Rzewski's treatment of it – 36 variations this time rather than 33 – treads a parallel course, playful and profound. The People's latest – and possibly most beguiling – recorded exponent is Rzewski himself in a handsome 7-CD retrospective that covers 10 works, all recently recorded and newly issued. You can hear Rzewski coil music around his own quiet-voiced recitations of Wilde (in De Profundis), or thread some colourful variations on a Yiddish song in Mayn Yingele, ideal for those who like to listen "easy" while keeping their brains in gear. Most works touch on territories somewhere between jazz, Bartok and John Cage, who has a five-minute tribute all to himself called A Life.

The spirit of Cage also permeates the prepared piano in George Crumb's astrologically structured Makrokosmos, when the piano strings rumble or roar like an echoing lift-shaft and pianist Andrew Russo adds the occasional vocal obbligato. Russo is an undisputed master of Crumb's exotic sound world, especially in the "Messiaenic" miniatures of A Little Suite for Christmas. But for many, I suspect the real pull will be the evocative strains of Voice of the Whale "for three masked players", namely electric flute, cello and piano. The clinching track will probably be the last, "Sea Nocturne for the end of time", memories of whales singing hauntingly, conjured up by Conchord and beautifully engineered by Black Box.

* Beethoven-Caine Diabelli Variations, Uri Caine (fortepiano), Concerto Köln Winter & Winter 910 086-2

* 'Rzewski plays Rzewski: Piano Works 1975-1999' Nonesuch 79623-2 (seven discs)

* Crumb, 'Makrokosmos, A Little Suite for Christmas, Voice of the Whale', Andrew Russo, Conchord Black Box BBM1076