These 10 releases of 2007 offer a measure of distinction

The ongoing changes in the recording industry have really influenced the classical field this year, with organizations and individual musicians marketing performances on their own labels, and digital downloads becoming more widely used.

The area trendsetter, of course, is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which in 2007 launched its own label with physical recordings featuring works by Mahler and Bruckner under principal conductor Bernard Haitink.

CSO Resound's first download (Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung), will be available from iTunes beginning Jan. 8.

Here's our annual list of Top 10 releases, with the usual reminder that these may not arbitrarily be "the best" out of the many releases of 2007, but those that provided special pleasure during the year.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A Minor. Claudio Abbado conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. EuroArts DVD (surround-sound stereo).

Mahler's most emotionally pessimistic symphony is given a performance for the ages, recorded in video at the 2006 Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. Abbado's battle with cancer over the past seven years makes this concert especially poignant. The exhausted conductor's face betrays his painful personal association with Mahler's daunting hammer-blows of fate, struck in the symphony's final movement.

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major. Bernard Haitink conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. CSO Resound (hybrid multichannel SACD).

The second release on the CSO's new label is a sublime interpretation by the CSO's principal conductor of arguably Bruckner's finest symphony. Praise also goes to producer James Mallinson and engineer Christopher Willis for taming Orchestra Hall's tricky acoustics.

Robert Schumann: Fantasie in C Major; Kreisleriana; Arabesque in C Major. Jonathan Biss, piano. EMI Classics.

The amazing 26-year-old American pianist brings interpretive insight as well as technical mastery of his instrument to a recording that has garnered worldwide acclaim. Biss' subsequent CD of Beethoven sonatas, released this fall, is on the same exalted level.

Howard Hanson: "Merry Mount," opera in three acts. Gerard Schwarz conducting soloists and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Naxos (two discs).

Taped during Seattle concerts in 1996, Naxos obtained the release rights to Hanson's neglected masterpiece as part of its American Classics Series. It is the first complete professional recording of "Merry Mount" since its 1930s premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.

"American Virtuosa: Tribute to Maud Powell." Rachel Barton Pine, violin; Matthew Hagle, piano. Cedille Records.

Considered the finest American violinist at the turn of the 20th century, Maud Powell, an Illinois native, toured extensively playing classical and popular music by American composers. Pine, one of Powell's most ardent admirers, brings nearly two dozen of these neglected works to life.

Richard Wagner: "Götterdämmerung." Joseph Keilberth conducting, with Astrid Varnay (soprano), Wolfgang Windgassen (tenor), other soloists and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra. Testament (four discs).

The concluding opera of the first stereo "Ring" cycle, this never-released performance from 1955 was locked in the vaults of Decca Records for a half century before Testament secured release rights to this and the other three "Ring" operas. These amazing Keilberth-conducted performances were taped live at the Bayreuth Festival as dry runs for Decca's Georg Solti-conducted Vienna studio recordings from 1957-64.

Johannes Brahms: "Ein Deutsches Requiem." Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, with Dorothea Röschmann (soprano) and Thomas Quasthoff (baritone). EMI Classics.

Rattle, a Briton who has brought much new and unfamiliar music to the heretofore conservative Berlin Philharmonic, turns to one of the grandest of German choral works in a performance that rivals the majestic interpretation by the late German maestro Otto Klemperer.

"Just Before Sunrise." Nathan Gunn (baritone), orchestras conducted by David Cullen and Joseph Thalken. Sony Classics.

Nathan Gunn, soon to appear as Figaro in Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of "The Barber of Seville," describes this program of songs as those "that remind everyone of the beauty that surrounds them in their lives." This is a well-conceived collection by one of opera's biggest stars.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5, "Serenade to Music," Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Robert Spano conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and chamber chorus. Telarc (hybrid multichannel SACD).

Spano offers three of the renowned British composer's most important works, presented in Telarc's usual state-of-the-art sound, as a follow-up to his Grammy Award-winning disc of Vaughan Williams' "A Sea Symphony."

Antonio Vivaldi: "The Four Seasons" (four concertos for violin and orchestra). Sarah Chang, violin; Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. EMI Classics.

There's no shortage of classic recordings of this famous work, but Chang finds a fresh approach, evidence of her evolving musical maturity since her "prodigy" days. She even adds a fifth Vivaldi concerto as an encore!