It"s the time of year when your mailbox is stuffed with brochures for the new musical season. Before you know it, you will once again be spending two, three nights a week basking in the glory that is live music. But it is still August, so canned music will have to do, unless you make it yourself (don"t let us try and stop you).

For an industry whose death knell has been sounding for a generation, the classical recording trade has been remarkably productive recently. This is partially due to the exciting and high-quality work of independent producers. They have been the source for a number of releases of local interest. Bridge Records has been steadily turning out a George Crumb Edition, including his most recent work, the American Songbook, as performed by Orchestra 2001. The latest CD is a compilation of orchestra music compiled from previous Bridge releases. The earliest piece is Echoes of Time and the River, which earned Crumb the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. It is a compendium of the devices that would reverberate in the music to come; extensive percussion batteries replete with exotic instruments from around the world, chanted dialogue, quotes from older music, and a profound sense of mystery and beauty. Star Child, the 1977 extravaganza that is also on the disc, is a magnificent culmination of these elements.

One of Crumb's star students, and his successor on the Penn composition faculty, is Jay Reise. Reise writes in an eclectic manner that bows to no particular style, but it is significant that he is a passionate devotee of both jazz and the music of southern India, which is reflected in his rhythmic sensibility. His music can be very complex, and so he is extremely fortunate to have pianist Marc-André Hamelin as a champion, who, on The Devil in the Flesh and Other Pieces, a new album on the Albany label, draws out beautiful patterns and texture in this collection of pieces from 1993 to 2001, finding a serene coherence here. There are contributions as well from soprano Jody Karin Applebaum and bassoonist Charles Ullery.

Local fans of Russian vocal music will know the name of Ghenady Meirson, who coaches at both AVA and Curtis. He is a fabulously talented pianist, a product of the great Russian tradition (ironically, although born in Odessa, he received most of his training in the West from Slavic teachers), and offers a lovely program of Romantic solo piano music on a self-produced album entitled Songs and Dances (info at www.PrivateLessons.com). As he plays the music of Chopin, Mendelssohn, Granados, Rachmaninoff and Ryabov, these are truly songs without words.

And one more (sort of) local artist to talk about; Hillary Hahn is, along with a certain Chinese pianist, the most celebrated Curtis grad in recent years. Her new recording of the Violin Concerto of Elgar stands up to all of the fuss; this is boldly conceived, riveting playing. The superb performance is on the Deutsche Grammophon label.

One of the most exciting solo piano recitals last year was by New York new music specialist Marilyn Nonken. Her two new releases show off the kinder, gentler side of the contemporary scene. A two-disc set from Mode contains over an hour and a half of the unearthly, hushed washes of broken chords known as Triadic Memories, from the late, great Brooklyn-born visionary Morton Feldman. And from Metier Sound and Vision, a British label, another double disc: again, soft and magical music, this time from Tristan Murail, a leader of the French school of spectral music.

There is music new and not so new from Frederic Rzewski, who, while not as well-known as his minimalist colleagues Glass, Reich and Adams, deserves to be. The enterprising Chicago label Cedille offers a tribute, played by the excellent ensemble Eighth Blackbird, including a new mini-symphony written for them. The CD also includes the delightfully buoyant, semi-improvisatory Les Moutons de Panurge, and not least, the landmark work Coming Together, from 1971, based on the last letter of an inmate killed in the infamous Attica prison uprising.

Two new big-label releases of Slavic music are of interest. Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, from 1962, was based on Yevtushenko's epic poem Babi Yar. EMI and conductor Mariss Jansons continue their powerful series of Shostakovich recordings with this CD. This work, a condemnation of anti-Semitism that was very controversial in the Soviet Union of 1962, leans somewhat toward the melodramatic side of the composer's voice, but it packs a wallop nevertheless, especially in the haunting closing pages. Karol Szymanowski, the most famous Polish composer you never heard of, gets major exposure from Virgin Classics, courtesy of their piano sensation, Piotr Anderszewski. The music, mainly from the first two decades of the 20th century, is highly chromatic, exotically beautiful, in the manner of late Scriabin.

Just one more: a new album from OMAC Records of music by crossover violinist Mark O'Connor, featuring his Double Violin Concerto. His partner in the piece is none other than the lady in the red dress, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. The music is rather derivative, perhaps predictable, but this is some bitchin' fiddling by this pair. Yeah, even us classical heads can have fun. Sometimes. (It's August, for God's sake!)