Memory may be playing a few tricks on me, but I don’t think so. The first time I heard the Moscow-born Johnny Gandelsman, now 48, he was playing Mahler as James Levine’s concertmaster in the Verbier Festival Orchestra, a finishing school for élite conservatory graduates. Next, I caught him as founder and first violin of the purposefully eclectic string quartet Brooklyn Rider. The Riders were performing on the Lower East Side in a decommissioned Gothic-revival synagogue putatively modeled on the Cologne Cathedral. In the meantime, Gandelsman has lent his talents to the Silk Road Ensemble and The Knights, recorded J. S. Bach’s cello suite on the fiddle, and been inducted as a MacArthur Fellow in the class of 2024. His project This Is America, conceived in the first months of the pandemic, is a mosaic of new pieces commissioned from some two-dozen composers. Charged with music that might in some way reflect the unrealities of the moment, they delivered what sounds, in Gandelsman’s description, like a composite musical portrait of America on the cusp of its first quarter millennium. “Twenty-five voices is a drop in the bucket,” Gandelsman says, “but it’s just a way to expand the lens a little bit and just acknowledge that it’s hard to define what classical music is. It’s hard to define what this country is. But it’s not hard to find really great creative people and share their music with audiences.” At Caramoor, he offers selections; for the complete set, seek out the recording, all three CDs’ worth. —Matthew Gurewitsch