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ut of the blue an agreeable shock—a promotional email from Klangforum Wien announcing a release on two col legno CDs of the music of Lucia Dlugoszewski, seven works in all. Lucia died in 2000. Your very old reporter’s crumbling memory puts our friendship’s beginning at, perhaps, 1996. I’d acquired about a year earlier a review set of VoxBox CDs, Orchestra of Our Time, a program of classical’s modernists—Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, George Crumb, Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, Luciano Berio’s treatment of Kurt Weill’s Surabaya Johnny, and, to me, an unknown, Lucia Dlugoszewski.

But first, an inappropriate aside about recording, the impressions it imparts, and a confession: I am an audiophile. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists audiophilia among other hobbies such as necrophilia, coprophilia and pedophilia. It shares features with religious mania. Or think, perhaps, of the insights one discovers in a First Nation sweat lodge. In matters of recorded sound an audiophile obsesses over anything relating to his playback array and is willing to spend inordinately in achieving an auditory Will-o’-the-Wisp. The farthest gone among us can drop several hundred K on electronics and mechanicals, and as much on cabling as buys a lightly used Ford F-150. The price of a pair of speakers can exceed that of a middling hamlet’s operating budget. Certain turntable-tonearm rigs remind one of Rube Goldberg in a tidier frame of mind. There exists, I’m not kidding, a turntable-tonearm combo that costs a half-million. An audiophile professes to hear differences in electrical outlets. Mine are Japanese. We move on:

Audiophilia’s gentry understands that music, more especially classical, is performed (mainly) by acoustic instruments. The best recordings capture a performance in as lifelike a manner as production hardware, one’s playback system and room acoustics permit. One could call it a bug-in-amber idealization of a composer’s creation—exquisite and permanent. The most lifelike recordings, in this listener’s estimation, are minimalist, which is to say, accomplished with a lesser amount recording-site hardware, microphones and mixers especially. The VoxBox pair, released in 1995, was produced over the years by Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz. As a reviewer in the main of twentieth-century classical on disc, my initial ho-hum interest in a bargain label’s program differed little from review CDs I received routinely. My respiration accelerated on discovering that Aubort and Nickrenz’s Elite Recordings, Inc. did the tech work.

The VoxBox’s Fire Fragile Flight, with Joel Thome conducting the Orchestra of Our Time, comes in at 8:34. The col legno’s, with Klangforum Wien conducted by Johannes Kalitzke, runs 11:13. That’s a significant difference. I find it difficult to identify the disparities in a work consisting more of assertive shards than an articulated narration. Both recordings are superb. (The entirety of the col legno set is very well recorded.) Aubort’s signature technique puts Fire Fragile Flight in an airier space. The col legno’s presentation is more front-and-center—indeed, in-your-face—which is entirely appropriate for Lucy’s energetic, often rambunctious music. Feldman wanted his music played quietly. Lucy, not.

As a generality (my go-to gambit), an avant-garde’s side-effect is often alienation. How difficult now to understand how the French Impressionists provoked consternation. Closer to our time, we’ve Jackson Pollock. (“My kid could do that!”) Music lovers also require time to adapt, if ever. The fissure separating Brahams from Webern is vast, and remains so. Lucy’s intrusions place her in the New York School’s wide net, which, in music, mostly meant John Cage and Morton Feldman. She’d studied with Cage and Edgar Varèse. The latter’s exuberant aesthetic clearly carried the field. Lucy ascribed her failure to enter Cage-Feldman’s inner sanctum to Feldman’s hostility, touched with misogyny. Maybe so. Yet, from where I listen these many years on, there’s more to it than animus. Their music, Cage’s included, is poles apart. Feldman’s musical language would never frighten small children or horses. His challenge to complaisance consists of the demands he makes on the listener’s time. He wrote a string quartet that, if played without breaks, requires of its performers diapers, catheters or extraordinarily elastic bladders, which is why Feldman on recording is so much more enjoyable—one indeed takes breaks or merely plays a side or two. Further, a fine recording’s eerily pristine setting betters that of live performance, especially in Feldman’s case, in which a filigree creation occurs within a pitch-black silence. I have in mind a consistently superb Feldman project on Werner Uehlinger’s HatArt label. Alas and alack, and woe is me, a ton of years ago I recommended Lucy’s music to Uehlinger, unsuccessfully. These Klangforum Wien performances handsomely fill that void. So bravo col legno, the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and anything or anyone I’ve failed to mention.

Lucy was married to the dancer-choreographer Erick Hawkins, who died in 1994. She adored the man and his memory, which did not deter her from saying, I suspect, tongue-in-cheek, that she’d be hitting on me were it not for my Polish wife. Prim fellow that I am, I tried not to look shocked. Hawkins and his company figure large in Lucy’s compositions. In the way of prestige, disc one begins with a work for trumpet and orchestra commissioned by trumpeter Gerard Schwartz and the New York Philharmonic when under Pierre Boulez’ direction: Abyss and Caress (1975). Similarly, Fire Fragile Flight won a Koussevitsky International Recording Award in 1977. (This had to have been the Aubort-Nickrenz session.) The set’s excellent German-English notes cover whatever you’re likely to ask.