Liszt: "Piano Music Vol 5 (14 Schubert song transcriptions)". Oxana Yablonskaya, piano (Naxos)

Following the two discs of Harmonies poetiques Et religieuses, in big-boned performances by Philip Thomson, Naxos's Liszt series offers a selection of Schubert transcriptions played by Oxana Yablonskaya. This US-resident Russian, who has been heard in Dublin under the aegis of Dublin Master Classes and at Kilkenny Arts Week, boasts a powerful technique fully the equal of Liszt's often demanding transcriptions. Her style is more pianistic than vocal. She is happy to break the line of a melody as no singer would dare - something the master pianists of an earlier generation seem to have avoided. Yet at her best, as andchen from Schwanengesang, and in most of the more sombre songs, she's mighty persuasive.

By Michael Dervan

Bruce Ford: "Great Operatic Arias" (Chandos)

Opera in English is always a potentially ludicrous business - one only needs to ponder the efficacity of the phrase "Your tiny hand is frozen" as a chat-up line to see the problem - and when the tunes are as well-known as those on this selection by the English tenor Bruce Ford, the anglicised words sound, well, completely foreign. Thus Donizetti's Una Furtiva Lagrima becomes "I saw the tear that furtively/Down her sweet face did flow . . . " and Flotow's M'appari (which should, of course, actually be Ach, so fromm since Martha is actually a German opera in any case) has lines like "Ere I saw thy sweet face/on my heart there was no trace . . . " The more I listen to this - and there are, it must be said, many tasteful things in Bruce Ford's singing, though he uses vibrato a bit too often for my taste - the more I realise that the very thing I like about opera is that it isn't in English.

By Arminta Wallace

Pauline Oliveros: "I of IV; Big Mother Is Watching You; Bye Bye Butterfly" (Paradigm Discs)

Here are three electronic pieces made in the mid-1960s by Texan Pauline Oliveros (born 1932). Oliveros, who had a childhood fascination with shortwave radio, worked in improvisation groups with fellow composers Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick before getting involved in electronics in 1961. More recently she has been creating "meditations" which elide the distinction between audience and performer, and formed the Deep Listening Band for "listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing". This outlook may also be the key to the 1960s improvised electronic pieces, where the tranced prolongation of decorated drones almost evokes the incense of three decades ago.

By Michael Dervan