Liner Notes by Notables

We like the way Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller writes of the “near climaxes” and “explosion” of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. And the macho way novelist Joseph Heller mentions “the imperative authority of the harsh brass” in Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. And how Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley frets she may not be up for Mozart’s ability to sweep her “upward into some empyrean space.”

Open a new Penguin Music Classic CD case, and you get a celebrated classical work--say the London Symphony Orchestra’s version of a Rachmaninoff piano concerto--along with an original essay on the music by a renowned writer such as Garrison Keillor, Ethan Canin or Stephen Jay Gould.

The CDs and essays came out of a recent partnership between PolyGram Classics & Jazz and Penguin Books. But not all of the essayists are with Penguin Books; they agreed to write the liner notes because of their love for the music, said Olga Makrias, a PolyGram spokeswoman. “When you read some of the essays, you sort of understand the passion they have for [the music],” she said.

So far, 20 CDs have been released, with five more due in March.