This album of the year will last you a lifetime

It’s my very last Album of the Year for sinfinimusic.com, which is being wound down, and I found myself reflecting critically on the ones I had missed.

At this time of year, my thoughts always turn to the ones that got away. Allowed to choose just one release a week for review, I find myself regretting the fantastic works and performances that, for one reason or other, missed the cut.

Leo Ornstein, for instance. Ornstein was a Russian-Jewish composer who migrated to the US in 1906 and died in 2002 at the age of 108. After a couple of decades of frenetic modernist composition, he went against the grain, recommitted himself to melody and was shoved rudely into obscurity. A pair of 1920s chamber works on Hyperion, scintillating performances by the Pacifica Quartet with Marc-André Hamelin, have been among my most-played pieces of the year.

No, it’s not that one. To find out which 2015 release will, in my view, last the test of time, click here.