Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly – the composer’s selfproclaimed favourite work and certainly one of the most beloved operas in the repertoire – is brought to life at the world-famous Arena di Verona. This opulent production, directed by respected film and opera director Franco Zeffirelli, is sung by a cast of excellent singers. Fiorenza Cedolins is a sought after Butterfly singer and her Pinkerton is performed by the renowned tenor Marcello Giordani. The celebrated operatic baritone Juan Pons gives the principled United States consul Sharpless. The performance is lead by long-established Arena di Verona conductor Daniel Oren with all the splendour that a Puccini opera demands. The sum of all this is a gloriously sung musical experience.

Walk the Dog and Light the Light is the ninth studio album by Bronx-born singer, songwriter, and pianist Laura Nyro. It was released in the late summer of 1993, more than nine years after its predecessor, Mother's Spiritual. It followed Nyro's 1989 live album Laura: Live at the Bottom Line, and the atmosphere here is similarly laidback and easygoing. It was the last album of new original material that Nyro released during her lifetime, although she began recording another album in 1994, which was released in 2001 as Angel in the Dark. Walk the Dog and Light the Light received positive critical notices, and Nyro supported the album with a string of intimate dates with a harmony vocal group.

For a band that rescued rock & roll from the Uriah Heeps of the world in the late '70s, and made a mark on everything that followed, the Sex Pistols left behind precious little in terms of their recorded legacy. Their only official release being the earth-shattering NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, enthusiasts have to turn to collections of outtakes and live material to further satisfy their Pistols jones. This brings us to the mysterious NO FUTURE U.K. With virtually nothing to go on in terms of liner notes or credits, it's hard to determine exactly where these alternate version of well-known Pistols songs like "Pretty Vacant" and "Liar" are from. Are they rehearsal recordings? Demos? Outtakes? We may never know for sure, but one thing is for certain, they are relatively well-recorded, full of patented Pistols energy, and among the band's finer performances, all of which puts NO FUTURE towards the front of the posthumous Pistols pack.

It's never easy to be the sibling of a star when you're active in the same profession – ask Joey Travolta or Frank Stallone, and try to find out what happened to John Murray, one of Bill's brothers. Similarly, David Knopfler, younger brother of Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, has often remained in his brother's shadow, unfairly remaining a footnote in the famous British band's history and not always gaining much recognition for his solo work – provided people know he's remained active in music at all. The comparison to the abovementioned actors is misleading, however, since they all possess little of their siblings' talent, whereas David Knopfler has proven himself to be a talented musician with considerable songwriting skills of his own and several strong solo releases under his belt.

NOW That's What I Call Pride! is an installment in the American compilation album series "NOW That's What I Call Music!" It is expected to be released on May 20, 2022. It is notable for being the first NOW! album in any country to be specifically focused on LGBTQ+ pride.

Ian Gillan, together with Robert Plant, Ozzy Osbourne and a few others, is considered one of the legendary voices that shaped hard rock. Despite his commitment to Deep Purple, the singer has built an impressive solo career. "Contractual Obligation" is a collection of performances during a recent tour through Eastern Europe, which contains three shows which will be released on different formats via earMUSIC on July 26, 2019. Still fresh from the success of the studio album "NOW What?!", and just a few months before the release of the latest and equally successful album "inFinite", Ian Gillan accepted the offer to tour for a month in Eastern Europe with a full rock show, accompanied every night by a different local orchestra. Gillan decided to recruit the Don Airey Band, which features the guitar talent of Simon McBride. All shows were truly unique, with Airey and McBride delivering perfect performances night after night.

In 1970, Ashton, Gardner & Dyke somehow ended up supplying the soundtrack music to an obscure Western starring football star Joe Namath. Also important to the soundtrack's composition and performance was Deep Purple's Jon Lord, who co-wrote the score with Tony Ashton and shared keyboard parts with Ashton as well. Like many soundtracks, it's a jumble of pieces that might have served adequately as background music to specific scenes, but doesn't sustain much interest for a record listener. The musicians tap into a wide variety of styles and moods, mostly instrumental with occasional vocals, from good-time laid-back bar band boogie and dramatic pseudo-spaghetti Western orchestrations to atonal keyboard patterns, tedious hard rock-funk, and Latin cocktail jazz with bizarre scatting. The individual tracks, though, are neither too good on their own, or too similar to each other, failing to create an inviting mood.

Naxos began its Haydn series with his last four sonatas, perhaps to tempt listeners into investigating the series. Jenö Jandó, the house pianist for Naxos, has maintained a surprisingly high standard in his many previous recordings, but in Haydn he outdoes himself. He has obviously studied these pieces well, and he plays them as individual works, with intelligent and meaningful characterization of each and a good appreciation of Haydn's sparkling wit. This is indeed a good place to start investigating Haydn's piano sonatas, since each one on this disc is a masterpiece. But so are many of the others in this series.

For Jackets XL, the Yellowjackets' 25th album and fourth for Mack Avenue Music Group, the band continues to stretch and reinvent itself with an exciting, full-bodied collaboration with the superb WDR Big Band of Cologne, Germany. The project combines the shapeshifting, multiple GRAMMY® Award-winning quartet with the renowned big band, re-imagining well-known band originals with dynamic new arrangements that feature twists and turns, textures and colors, moving harmonies and bold solos. With it's pockets of halcyon, buoyance, mystery, tumult, groove and whimsy, Jackets XL plays out as a multifaceted documentation of how far the band has come. "It was like putting a new set of clothes on," Bob Mintzer says. "This represents how the Yellowjackets play now."

Brand new studio album from Sammy Hagar and The Circle — Sammy Hagar (vocals), Michael Anthony (bass), Jason Bonham (drums/percussion), Vic Johnson (guitars). Featuring the title track, “Father Time,” “Funky Feng Shui” and more.