Holiday Gift Guide : Calendar’s little helpers offer suggestions in pop, jazz, holiday, family and classical music, plus videos, computer games and books. (Good news: They’re easy to wrap.) : CLASSICAL! : Gifts in Concert With Music Lovers

We’ve narrowed down to a precious few, all of four-star caliber, the releases of a year uncommonly rich in recorded delights, including some music you’re unlikely to encounter in a lifetime of concert-going.

CAGE, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, Newport Classic ($9.98). World Music too much of a hodgepodge? Minimalism, well, not enough? Pianist Joshua Pierce returns us to a still-fresh source of both: John Cage’s dreamlike jangling, buzzings, rattling and smashing silences--reminders of the delights of going nowhere, exquisitely.

CHOPIN, The Two Piano Concertos, RCA Victor ($12.98). A live-recording souvenir of an event that took place in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on March 27, 1984, when a curly-haired cherub named Yevgeny Kissin brought the ultimate in sensitivity, strength and interpretive maturity to these pillars of the Romantic repertory. He was all of 12 years old at the time.

HAYDN, Symphonies Nos. 93, 95 and 97, Sony Essential Classics ($6.98). George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, in its 1960s prime, offer incomparably witty, energetic interpretations of three of the most imposing--and least familiar--of the “London” symphonies, reissued (after a long absence from the catalogue) at super-budget price. The perfect stocking-stuffer for the mature listener.

PROKOFIEV & SHOSTAKOVICH, Violin Concertos, Teldec ($12.98). The one recording to buy if you’re buying only one in 1995: the first violin concerto of each composer, delivered with sumptuous tone, hellacious technique and the appropriate lashings of gall by the young Siberian tiger Maxim Vengerov, with Mstislav Rostropovich conducting the London Symphony.

PURCELL, “King Arthur,” Erato ($25.98, two CDs). This extravagantly tuneful, jingoistic operatic pageant becomes the recorded highlight of the Purcell tricentennial celebration in a sumptuous production by singers and instrumentalists of the multinational Arts Florissants ensemble, led by its founder-director, William Christie.

RAMEAU, Orchestral Suites from “Nais” and “Le Temple de la Gloire,” Harmonia Mundi ($12.98). All the musical pomp and splendor of the court at Versailles, joyously delivered by America’s best period band, Philharmonia Baroque, conducted by the irrepressible Nicholas McGegan.

ROSSINI, “Tancredi,” Naxos ($13.98, two super-budget CDs). Ignore the stupid plot, revel in a succession of knockout arias and ensembles, with plenty of the composer’s patented zippy crescendos, from a dazzling cast of singing acrobats--the tessitura stays in nosebleed country much of the time--headed by Ewa Podles, Sumi Jo and Stanford Olson. A vocal banquet at a fast-food price.

SCHUBERT, Sonata in B-flat, D. 960; “Landler,” D. 171, EMI ($12.98). Stephen Kovacevich reminds us of the meaning of the nowadays seldom-applicable expression “poet of the piano” in his mellow, introspective, even heroic journey through the grandest and most songful of Schubert’s sonatas.

SHOSTAKOVICH, Symphony No. 15, Berlin Classics ($9.98). The composer’s last and most enigmatic symphony, full of snide jokes, a few bangs and a whimpering--or is it smirking?--end. Kurt Sanderling, leading the Berlin Symphony, is the sure-footed guide through this musical minefield, with its quotes from Rossini’s “William Tell” (who was that masked commissar?), the darkly significant (but of what?) “Fate” motive from Wagner’s “Ring” and other brainteasers.

SZYMANOWSKI, “King Roger,” Marco Polo ($25.98, two CDs). Russian Orthodox chant, mystical apparitions, nightingales, lotus blossoms, Impressionism, homoeroticism, paganism, Mohammedanism, Catholicism. The gorgeously lyrical-loony 1925 opera is presented by singers and instrumentalists from the composer’s native Poland under the expert baton of Antoni Wit.

WEBERN, Music for String Quartet, Deutsche Grammophon ($12.98). Ghostly pinpricks of sound here, late Romantic lushness there: the chamber music of the Viennese modernist projected with breathtaking clarity and purity of tone by the incomparable Emerson String Quartet.

THE FEAST OF SAN ROCCO, VENICE, 1608, Sony ($25.98, two CDs). “It did ravish and stupefie all those who attended . . . singers, sackbuts, cornets, all so excellent as to constantly astonish and enrapture,” wrote an English traveler of the fabulous entertainment in St. Mark’s Cathedral--with music chiefly by Giovanni Gabrieli--re-created here by an assemblage of superb singers and period instrumentalists under Roland Wilson’s direction.