A great collection of Who songs, accompanied by the ultimate collection, makes for superb listening of your favourite Who songs. Few rock & roll bands were riddled with as many contradictions as the Who. All four members had wildly different personalities, as their notorious live performances demonstrated: Keith Moon fell over his drum kit while Pete Townshend leaped into the air with his guitar, spinning his right hand in exaggerated windmills.

This is a bargain priced box set of Lydia Mordkovitch's violin sonata recordings made for Chandos in the 1980s. I am admirer of her playing, particularly in the English repertoire, Howells, Dyson and Vaughan Williams (the Carlton disc with Julian Milford is a lost classic), none of which is unfortunately represented here. What we are given is a cross-section of continental work with the emphasis heavily on the Central-European tradition, tempered to some extent by the inclusion of Prokofiev and Fauré. T

Like so many of his contemporaries Bartok underwent a period of artistic self-examination immediately after the First World War. The Violin Sonata No. 1 is the first result of that reappraisal and it has all the hallmarks of a style in transition—in other words, it is a jolly tough nut to crack, and it remains so even in a performance as consistently colorful and high-powered as Kremer and Argerich's.

These chamber works center around the horn as a chamber instrument. The horn contributes an interesting character to the music, especially when there is a piano employed. The String Trio of 1984 is here scored for horn, violin, and piano. The Horn Quartet of 1975 is scored for horn, violin, cello, and piano. The Trio is more representative of Simpson's mature style; it tends more toward a melodic polytonality. His Horn Quartet is more rugged, and the scales are tipped toward atonality. Extremely interesting postmodern works.

Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud spent more than twenty years as a member of the experimental and always innovative Kronos Quartet. She left the group in 1999, and has since created an adventurous and captivating body work, including four previous CD releases, including the Grammy-nominated Strange Toys ( Talking House Records, 2008) and 2010's Pop-Pop (Deconet Records), in collaboration with percussionist/multi-instrumentalist PC Munoz.

Wer sich Musik von Marlene Dietrich kauft, weiss nie so recht, wann die Aufnahmen entstanden sind und aus welchem ursprünglichen Zusammenhang sie stammen. "Einfach das Beste" ist eine stimmige Zusammenstellung, müsste aber eigentlich das "Berlin-Album" genannt werden. Es ist keine eigentliche "Best Of", sondern eine CD mit 14 Liedern, die sich inhaltlich hauptsächlich um Marlenes Heimatstadt Berlin drehen.

Jean-Bernard Pommier (born August 17, 1944 in Beziers), is a French pianist and conductor. Pommier studied conducting at the Conservatoire de Paris with Yves Nat, Pierre Sancan and Eugene Bigot. In 1962 he won the International Competition for Young Musicians in Berlin. Then at 17 he was a finalist in the International Tchaikovsky Competition.[1] He has performed in recitals and as soloist with numerous orchestras and in several European festivals.

On her clarinet, Sharon Kam expresses something for which there are no words. At one with her instrument, she thrills in this compilation with a virtuosic suppleness and sensitive cantabile in a class of its own. A firework display of vivacity and emotion. This reissue includes works by Weber, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Massenet.

Quatuor Ébène has done it again. After offering not only pristine and passionate performances of Ravel, Debussy, Faure, Brahms and their recent adventure into FICTION they return to the classics. This well recorded (very presence oriented) recital is all Mozart and it is understandable that this brilliant French quartet would elect to publicly cleanse the palette after the foray into music inspired by Hollywood.

While Universal's budget-priced best-of series, 20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection, is welcome for introducing inexpensive compilations of a wide range of recording artists, it also complicates things for consumers when an act already has one or more collections currently in the marketplace. A good example is Joe Walsh. Walsh originally gained renown in 1969 as a member of the James Gang, which recorded for ABC Records, the catalog for which is now controlled by Universal and released through MCA Records.

Ernest and persuasive while it's spinning, the better qualities of this 2006 recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio dissipate soon after the disc stops. With pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Gil Shaham, and cellist Truls Mørk as partners in the proceedings, the playing itself is first-class. Each is a highly regarded virtuoso, and collectively they form an agile but cogent chamber ensemble. Interpretively, their focus is on expressivity.

Originally released in 1982 by Arista in the U.K. and reissued on CD by the Dutch Disky imprint in 2001, Celebration serviceably culls some of the better moments from Simple Minds' first three albums: 1979's Life in a Day and Reel to Real Cacophony and 1980's Empires and Dance. Given the sadly neglected status of the band's early catalog – meaning anything that was released prior to 1982's breakthrough New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) – through the early 2000s, it is doubly unfortunate that a compilation like this remained out of print for an extended period of time.

The young Argentine cellist Sol Gabetta has emerged at the top of the heap with some speed in the 2010s. She merits the double greatest-hits album represented by this release, and it will be welcomed by listeners who haven't quite focused on her meteoric career. You get only one full-scale concerto, but it's a good one: Gabetta has a real way with Elgar, and the compilers did well to feature his music on most of disc one. You get the fresh interpretations of repertory recital and encore pieces that have really endeared Gabetta to ordinary concertgoers. Sample the marvelous Fauré Pavane, Op. 50, an excellent example of how with Gabetta, less is often more.

Sol Gabetta has established herself as one of the most promising cellists to emerge in the first decade of the 21st century, with a substantial international career as a soloist and with a growing number of recordings. While she has drawn most attention for her performances of the standard concerto and chamber music repertoire, she has also championed contemporary works by composers as diverse as Takemitsu, Ligeti, Gubaidulina, Rihm, and Vasks.

Few people nowadays seriously believe Vivaldi wrote the same concerto five hundred times. But the view that there is little variety in Vivaldi's oeuvre is still widely held. Louis T. Vatoison, in the programme notes to this recording, has a strongly different perception: "a Vivaldi concerto must (…) be seen as an individual 'snapshot', whose instrumental layout or formal structure implicitly reveal at what period, and sometimes even for whom it was written". The music on this disc gives ample evidence for this view.