I found great beauty in the voices of Emily D'Angelo and Lise Davidsen, delighted in the ecstatic moments within Julius Eastman's Femenine, trembled in the face of Sofia Gubaidulina's mammoth symphonic forces and found comfort in the symmetry of a Mozart sonata and the sweet collaboration between Toumani Diabaté's kora and the London Symphony Orchestra. These 10 albums, presented here in unranked order, are my personal An die Musik.

And while musicians were largely sidelined from concert halls, many of them braved the recording studio and released perhaps the most meaningful albums of their lives. Most of the albums on the list below were made while the pandemic was raging. The opening lines of Franz Schubert's song 'An die Musik,' his love letter to music from 1817, speaks of personal troubles, of being 'caught in life's unruly round,' and how the power of music can 'lift you to a better world.' Those sentiments have been hitting very close to the bone for many of us over the last year or so.

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