Tao was so grounded in this series of American works that explored “lines that are refracted or fragmented,” as he described it, you wouldn’t have suspected that earlier in the week he played Gershwin’s Concerto in F with the Pacific Symphony, Felipe Lara’s Injust Intonations at National Sawdust, two days later would play a completely different solo concert in Chicago (including Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue), and the following week, a Mozart concerto in Tokyo.

Jacob Ashworth’s shrewd adaptation transforms the piece into a chamber opera — eliminating the chorus and two minor characters, for a total of five cast members, and reimagining Barber’s angsty Neo-romantic score for seven instrumentalists, skillfully orchestrated by Dan Schlosberg. Director R. B. Schlather further tightens the lens with a crisp, minimalist blackbox production that intensifies the opera’s psychological underpinnings.

Blier and his skilled cast, soprano Christine Taylor Price, baritone Theo Hoffman, and pianist Bénédicte Jourdois, structured their program thematically, linking the composers’ songs in pairs connected by ideas alternately obvious and obscure. The result was fascinating and enjoyable — if over-reliant on some of Sondheim’s overly familiar hits.

CMS’s latest program, a celebration of perpetual motion, was a great example of what they do. Titled Moto Perpetuo, the evening gathered a team of superb musicians to play musical chairs, in a nicely balanced program of pieces each concluding with a movement in the tradition of the perpetual motion. The moto perpetuo is a composer’s sure-fire crowd-pleasing finale — a musical demonstration of Newton’s first law (an object set in motion…)

Heartbeat Opera’s Manon! is a triumph. Rory Pelsue’s production captures the audience’s attention, and navigates the psychology of the story with gripping focus. Grimsley demonstrates a rare ability to act through coloratura. Her buoyant, agile instrument scintillated, and she delivered the English text clearly and effortlessly.

Ukrainian-Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska led the New York Philharmonic in a program at David Geffen Hall this week that framed Joshua Bell’s performance in a rediscovered gem with equal parts hope and mourning for the people of Ukraine. An intensely riveting traversal,Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20.

Thile’s deeply personal, idiosyncratic set alternated between songs from his own oeuvre directly into extended passages of Bach. Thile’s nearly two-hour performance focused on the redemptive power of art, communing with Bach’s eternal truths supplied invaluable moments of reflection and meditation. Therapy, even — yes, Bach helps.

The audience arrived to find Zankel Hall arranged as a theatre in the round, encircling a concert grand sharing the stage with a Lumatone, a MIDI controller with a keyboard resembling the left box of an accordion (or the Jankó keyboard), illuminated in ethereal pinks and blues, the room splashed with atmospheric lighting effects. Tao is a pianist who functions thrillingly within traditional classical music trappings, but it was no mere gimmick that his solo return to Carnegie Hall brought a downtown sense of avant-garde to midtown. It’s in his soul.