New Recordings

"Nashville Winter" mixes Byrdsian country rock with steel guitar by Music City's venerable Lloyd Green. "101," on the other hand, is a bracing Bakersfield-style romp with a dash of Telecaster twang, and "Restless Moon" serves up Tex-Mex reminiscent of the Mavericks. "Someday" takes an acoustic turn, powered by the fiddle of Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins and the Dobro of album coproducer Greg Leisz, and "Gambler's Life" is a blast of spaghetti western. Nick 13 also refashions two Tiger Army numbers to fit the proceedings: "In the Orchard" has a steel- accented, Orbisonian sway, while "Cupid's Victim" channels Rick Nelson.

- Nick Cristiano

Jazz

A quartet of French musicians comes to praise gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. The title refers to the year of Django's birth, and the group, numbering three guitars and a bass, takes on six of the master's melodies, including a kickin' "Feerie."

The flying fingers of Olivier Kikteff and Benoit "Binouche" Convert dominate the show. Kikteff also contributes four tunes, including "Improsture No. 1," which has a scratchy, old-time-radio feel. The two guitarists and their accomplices - guitarist Yannick Alcocer and bassist Tanguy Blum - also do a lot of old standards, from a dramatic "St. James Infirmary" to a slowly strummed "There Will Never Be Another You." Overall, the intense swing is by turns sassy and hypnotic.

The group is at its best when it's enlarging the tent and bringing in multiple influences. like the Spanish tinge in Reinhardt's "Bolero."

- Karl Stark

Classical

Katrina Thurman, soprano; Steven Ebel, tenor; Thomas Meglioranza, baritone; Wilbur Pauley, bass; Washington Square Ensemble, Louis Karchin conducting.
(Naxos, ***1/2)

Philadelphia-born, New York-based Louis Karchin has written some tough - even forbidding - music, though you'd never know that from his effervescent 2007 comic opera Romulus, based on a drawing-room comedy by Alexandre Dumas about a baby turning up in a household of self-absorbed intellectuals. The libretto, about how cluelessly people can reject the joys of life that come their way, maintains a conversational chattiness that the composer translates into music with naturalistic diction and the inflections of a master dramatist.

Better still is Karchin's incredibly precise use of his 11-piece chamber orchestra, capturing the characters' busy intellects - and the thawing of their cerebral chilliness as the opera progresses. The ending is a bit of letdown, if only because you want some bigger musical and dramatic transformation. But the studio-made recording is beautifully produced and performed in a dramatically adept, diction-perfect cast headed by the superb Thomas Meglioranza.

- David Patrick Stearns