E-Mail This Article to a Friend High notes Great sounds from 2004 BY DAVID WEININGER

Even a casual follower of classical music is apt to have heard that its recording business is on the verge of collapse, drowning in rehashes of standard repertoire and expensive vanity projects that few are interested in and fewer still will buy. But for an industry in crisis, it manages to crank out a lot of marvelous stuff. Enough, perhaps, to dispel the doom and gloom about its future, at least briefly at the end of the year.

What follows isn’t a Top 10 list or a set of suggestions for stocking stuffers. Think of it rather as a selection of snapshots from the year’s offerings — bright lights from a still fresh and vital art form.

And it is still possible to make the most familiar of works sound fresh and vital. Exhibit A this year is René Jacobs’s recording of Le nozze di Figaro (Harmonia Mundi). There’s a lot of great singing here, including Simon Keenlyside as an intense, seething Count and Patrizia Ciofi as a poised and knowing Susanna. But what makes this Figaro one for the ages is the crackling energy and phenomenal detail that Jacobs and the first-rate Concerto Köln bring to the score. If you’ve resisted period-instrument versions of old favorites, this one may well make a convert of you.

Another excellent period-instrument opera recording comes from harpsichordist-turned-conductor Emmanuelle Haïm, who leads her Concert d’Astrée in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (Virgin). The results aren’t as world-altering as Jacobs’s, but the direction is similarly propulsive, and she has an amazing cast, including mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and tenor Ian Bostridge in the title roles.

Back to the radical-rethink category for Austrian pianist Till Fellner, whose recording of Book One of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (ECM) opens the piece up to an entirely new sound world. Glenn Gould has cast a long shadow over Bach pianists, but Fellner rejects Gould’s dry tone and laser-clear counterpoint, pedaling judiciously and playing with a hazy but beautiful aura that envelops Bach’s notes, making them seem even more otherworldly. When the individual lines emerge, they’re somehow even more remarkable, and Fellner also builds the architecture of the slower, monumental fugues, like the D-minor and the B-minor, with unerring power.

The most important release of contemporary music this year was William Bolcom’s epic setting of William Blake’s visionary Songs of Innocence and of Experience on the indispensable Naxos label. Bolcom’s cycle is a massive work for soloists, chorus, and many musicians that speaks in a bewildering variety of musical tongues: atonal modernism, jazz, rock, and grand operatic ensembles all find their way into the tapestry. This creates the perfect space for Blake’s hallucinatory poetry. Leonard Slatkin leads a gigantic array of performers and ensembles, most of them from the University of Michigan, where Bolcom has taught since 1973. The two-hour-plus experience is thrillingly unorthodox, just like the poet himself.

Among our tremendous local talent, Kim Kashkashian never seems to get the recognition she deserves. She’s a close associate of the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian, and their latest collaboration is a viola concerto titled . . . and then I was in time again that she plays on a recent ECM recording. It’s a strangely perfect pairing: Mansurian’s fragile, haunted music finds its presence in the muscular tone of Kashkashian’s playing. The Grammy-nominated recording includes other works by Mansurian, including the even more spectral Confessing with Faith for viola and four voices.

One of the great comebacks of last year was the pianist Leon Fleisher’s return to two-handed performing after years of playing with only his left hand. The aptly named Two Hands (Vanguard Classics) celebrates his welcome return. It opens with an arrangement of Bach’s "Jesus, bleibet meine Freunde" ("Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring") that’s played with absolute tranquillity and closes with the summa of piano sonatas, the Schubert B-flat. Its sense of unaffected purity is unearthly. As one critic said after one of his recitals, "One wanted to shake both of Mr. Fleisher’s hands."

Finally, anyone who thinks that Leonard Bernstein’s conducting became self-indulgent and willful with age — and there are many — should do himself or herself a favor and check out some of the budget-price boxed sets of Lenny’s recordings that Deutsche Grammophon has recently re-released. Four are devoted to a single composer — Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, and Sibelius — and a fifth has six wonderful discs of American music. Yes, Bernstein could wallow at times, but every set contains a lot of magnificent musicmaking: larger-than-life Beethoven, joyous Haydn, commanding Sibelius, all proving that he remained to the end one of America’s great musical communicators.