Three years past the centennial of his birth, Ol’ Blue Eyes is back, this time with a three-disc collection titled Standing Room Only (Capitol/UMe). Compiling three previously unreleased concerts, it’s less a study in masterly showmanship, although it’s that too, than proof of how radically the culture that Frank Sinatra bestrode like a colossus has changed.

Johnny Cash: Forever Words

Various artists

Just when the exploitation of the Johnny Cash brand seemed to have run its course, here comes this masterpiece by committee, in which 16 mostly famous acts take poems and lyrics that Cash never set to music and not only give them melodies but also arrange and record them with posterity—theirs and Cash’s—in mind. From performers who knew and/or were related to the man, such triumphs might seem inevitable, but even the outliers (Jewel, Elvis Costello, I’m with Her, Robert Glasper, Ro James) make good.

Happening upon the Bach Guild’s Big Broadway Box (eOne Music) at a time in which Kendrick Lamar wins a Pulitzer, one can’t help feeling like the Lerner-Loewe characters Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas when they accidentally find themselves in Brigadoon: thrilled to discover that access to wonders from a more felicitous era still exists.

Partir

Elina Duni

Progressives might disagree, but the rehabilitation of Elvis Presley’s artistic reputation began in earnest with the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.’s novel Elvis in the Morning in 2001. (Charlie Rose: “Mick Jagger said about this book, ‘It’s the best Elvis novel I’ve ever read.’” Buckley: “Well, I think there are only two.”)  

Portrait of a Lady with a Harp: Music for Queen Christina of Sweden

Mara Galassi

March 25 marked the centennial of the death of the greatest French composer of all time, Claude Debussy. Whether he’ll ever earn the title of “Greatest Composer of All Time, Period,” however, is unlikely, if only because he ignored many of the conventions used to compare and contrast great composers in the first place.

In terms of structure, tonality, texture, and sonority (almost everything, in other words, that makes music music), as well as in terms of his openness to non-European and extra-musical influences, Debussy followed his own rules.