Johnny Cash is a country music icon. His best period, of course, was probably on the Columbia label. This one picks up after he left Columbia in 1986 and signed with Mercury. Still, this isn't a bad set at all. This is another great disc in UMG's 20th Century Masters series. If your a huge Johnny Cash fan like I am, than this is a welcome member to your Cash collection. But, if your new or just a casual fan to Cash's music, buy this along with Sony's '16 Biggest Hits' and you are off to a great start.

Brilliant playing and great use of all of the marvelous tones an organ can produce. Tends to use the reed stops more which I know turns away some people but they add some brilliant color to the pieces. If you like Hindemith then you'll love this cd and Distler.

Ensemble 415 is a chamber ensemble devoted largely to the performance of Baroque music on period instruments. The numerical reference in the group's name derives from the pitch used for tuning instruments in the Baroque era. In performing chamber music, Ensemble 415 consists of just a few players, but for larger compositions, the number expands to a minimum of 13 and can reach up to as high as 40 performers. The ensemble's repertory has been broad over the years, taking in many Baroque standards by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, as well as lesser known fare by Muffat and others.

Quincy Jones' edition of Universal's 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection is hardly a comprehensive overview of Jones' career – that, as they say, would take a box set – but it does narrow in on the chart hits he had for A&M during the '70s and early '80s. Pretty much all of his pop crossovers of that era – outside of "'Roots' Medley," "Ai No Corrida," and "Money Runner," a theme song for the movie of the same name, released on Reprise – are here, which means this is very heavy on jazzy funk and jazzy quiet storm.

The Nina Simone entry in Universal Music's discount-priced best-of series 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection draws nine tracks from Simone's popular Philips Records albums of the mid-'60s, plus two tracks from her live album Let It Be Me, released by Verve Records in 1987. Several of Simone's most frequent concert selections and signature songs are included, among them a live take of "I Loves You Porgy," "Mississippi Goddam," "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and "The Other Woman." With a running time under 40 minutes and limited to only two of the labels for which Simone recorded, this is hardly a comprehensive compilation of her work. But it is a reasonable sampler at a reasonable price.

Robert Schumann's late music has undergone a revival, with its main traits of monothematicism, dense, close motivic work, and a certain spiky unpredictability having been redefined from faults into virtues. A good way, perhaps, to think about works like these three violin sonatas is that the young Brahms, visiting the Schumann household and mooning over the unavailable Clara, might easily have heard them and been directly influenced by them. Indeed, these pieces have the kind of long-range connections you find in Brahms, combined with a somewhat gnarly level of local detail, without the memorable tunes of Schumann's earlier works.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg's oeuvre is slowly starting to make its way into the international market. This 2009 Alto disc, a repackaged remastering of a 1998 Olympia disc, pairs the Polish-Russian composer's First and Fourth chamber symphonies. The First is a four-movement work for string orchestra from 1986 and the Fourth is a work with four-movements-in-one for string orchestra and clarinet from 1992. Both receive wholly dedicated works from the Umeå Symphony Orchestra under the leadership of Thord Svedlund.

Richter's austere and transcendent rendition of Beethoven Sonatas has no comparison. Reiner Maria Rilke wrote apt analogy of Beethoven's towering achievement in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) and the exactly same can be said about Richter's incomparable performances. Highly recommendable, alongside Richter's legendary Leipzig Recital Richter in Leipzig (1963).

Let me begin by saying that this only my third disc of the music of Czech composer Leos Janacek. (The other two being "Piano Works" with Rudolf Firkusny on DG Originals, and "Intimate Letters" with the Juilliard String Quartet.) From the onset I have been impressed by Janacek's compositional style – he seamlessly melds the passion of the great Romantic composers with the musical exploration and freedom of the early 20th Century composers, and in the process develops quite a unique voice.

It’s a measure of the paucity of recordings of the Cortot-Thibaud-Casals trio – itself a direct result of their deliberately limited repertoire – that this latest release in Naxos’s series has only one performance by the Trio itself. This all-Beethoven affair presents the Archduke Trio, supported by Thibaud and Cortot’s Kreutzer and the only recording ever made by Casals and Cortot as a duo, the Mozart Variations.

One of the most dynamic and accomplished artists to debut during the early '70s, singer and songwriter Chaka Khan secured her high standing as the frontperson of Rufus. A multiracial band that skillfully moved across soul, funk, rock, and jazz, they reached the mainstream with the slinking "Tell Me Something Good" (1974), a Top Five pop hit that won a Grammy, and throughout the decade continuously placed albums within the upper reaches of the pop and R&B charts. As Rufus remained active, Khan launched her solo career with "I'm Every Woman" (1978), an anthemic crossover disco smash that led to eight additional Top Ten R&B hits.

Marvin Gaye's Love Songs: Greatest Duets gathers most of his best-known duets, organizing them by singing partner. After getting off to a poor, but well-meaning start with a 1994 version of "Distant Lover" that pairs Gaye's original vocals with re-recorded vocals by Betty Wright and tinny-sounding production, the album does a 180 by offering up some of the best work Gaye did with his ultimate duet partner, Tammi Terrell. Along with definitive songs like "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By," the collection also includes lesser-known gems such as the lovely "If This World Were Mine."

In 1905, three musical friends who would later become giants as soloists came together to form a piano trio. After their initial successes, they reserved time each year from their hectic individual careers to meet in London or Paris to play chamber music. Their musical relationship lasted another twenty-nine years, with the three playing together for the last time in 1934. Although their repertoire was relatively small (only thirty-three works were programmed by the trio during their entire existence), they left behind a handful of recordings, that, more than seventy years on, are still benchmarks, and continue to garner enough sales to keep them alive in the catalog.

Both conductor and soloist are well-known for their performances of the Beethoven Violin Concerto – just not with each other. The conjunction of Furtwängler and Schneiderhan is probably the least-well remembered of the conductor’s collaborations, either live or studio. Similarly the violinist’s commercial DG recording, conducted by Eugen Jochum, holds the most pressing claim on the collector, notwithstanding Furtwängler’s eminence or the fact that the disc under review was made live in the Titania-Palast in Berlin in May 1953.

An American-British fortepianist, a Transylvanian violinist, and an Italian-British cellist join together into a trio with a Spanish name and produce a historical-instrument recording of a group of late Haydn trios that may well set the standard. Perhaps you can chalk it up to the increasingly international quality of the historical performance movement. Whatever the case, this recording showcases the strengths of historical instruments in Haydn and is just beautifully thought out in every detail.