Berlin Philharmonic:

Stockhausen and Kurtag.

(DG)

Dial-a-track code: 1641

Pull yourself together and hold on tight. Stockhausen's Gruppen has made it on to CD in a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic. With its requirements of three orchestras with three conductors (here, Friedrich Goldman, Claudio Abbado and Marcus Creed), Stockhausen's magnum opus of the 1950s, at once abstract and searingly visceral, fits no more comfortably into a two channel recording than it does into the average concert hall. Deutsche Grammophon have cunningly framed it with two death centred works written within the last 10 years by the Hungarian, Gyorgy Kurtag; Grabstein fur Stephan (shocking cries of anguish tear at a mood of quiet, guitar dominated elegy) and Stele (where the keening is both more funereal and more agitated). Abbado conducts as to the manner born.

Gianluca Cascioli: recitals (DG)

Dial-a-track code: 1751

Gianluca Cascioli is a young Italian pianist of whom you can expect to hear a lot more. Born in 1979, he took first prize at the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in 1994, and now has two CDs out from DG.

For debut recordings the contents read almost like an anti pigeon holing challenge - Beethoven, Webern, Schoenberg, Ligeti, Boulez on one, Bach, Busoni, Scarlatti, Beethoven/Rubinstein, Liszt, Debussy, Busoni, Falla, Prokofiev on the other. Cascioli is from the same stable as Dublin competition winner David Franceschetti, and is similarly formidably equipped. He's precocious and, with no fear of taking his strong musical attitudes to their logical extremes, provocative.

Szymanowski: Symphonies. Polish State PO (Katowice)/Karol Stryja. (Naxos)

Dial-a-track code: 1861

The best known large scale works of Karol Szymanowski, the opera King Roger, the Stabat Alater and the choral Third Symphony, are wonderfully haunting. Simon Rattle's 1994 CD coupling of the last two introduced the Polish composer's music to a wider audience, and now Naxos have brought out two sub £5 discs of his symphonies, reissuing performances which originally appeared on Marco Polo at full price.

The playing under Karol Stryja is not always of the most refined, but the mood and thrust of the music are accurately registered. The premature First and Second Symphonies are on one disc, the Third and Fourth coupled with the early, Straussian Concert Overture on the second.