On her PENTATONE debut Reine de coeur, star soprano Hanna-Elisabeth Müller brings the German and French art song traditions together, focusing on song cycles by Robert Schumann, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Francis Poulenc, accompanied by pianist Juliane Ruf. The album presents a highly personal anthology of songs that address love and loss, and the heights and depths of the human soul. While Schumann’s Sechs Gesänge Op. 107 and Sechs Gedichte und Requiem Op. 90 offer the quintessence of the Romantic German Lied, Zemlinsky’s turn-of-the-century Walzer-Gesänge introduce the listener to a later and less well-known chapter in the genre’s history.

Allan Clayton demonstrates his exceptional versatility with a Liszt programme of eighteen songs, all of which—in contrasting ways—make prodigious technical and musical demands of the performers.

We badly need a complete set of Zelenka's orchestra works, as Arkiv's edition has long vanished into the remainder bins, and this one (previously issued as three separate CDs) fits the bill nicely. Although the players use "authentic instruments", their sound is comparatively warm and gentle, though this doesn't mean that they don't handle with aplomb the insanely virtuosic horn parts in the Capriccios, or the bubbling wind writing in the Concerto. The inclusion of the overture from Melodrama de S. Wenceslao makes an interesting bonus, with its fascinating opposition of simultaneous duple and triple rhythms.

Le sonate per violino e basso continuo di Giovanni Antonio Guido (1675-1728 ca.) costituiscono un’importante testimonianza della diffusione della sonata italiana in Francia nella prima metà del Settecento. Nato a Genova, Guido si trasferì a Napoli verso la fine del XVII secolo per entrare a studiare come violinista presso il Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini. Completato il suo apprendistato intorno al 1690, entrò a far parte della Cappella Reale di Napoli, ma intorno al 1702 fu tra i primi musicisti napoletani a trasferirsi a Parigi. Le sei sonate pubblicate a Parigi nel 1726 e dedicate al Duca d’Orléans, si caratterizzano per una felice sintesi del virtuosismo italiano e dell’eleganza francese, uno stile che avrà un’influenza decisiva sui musicisti della generazione successiva.

Classica is the third studio album by Italian band Novembre.
After the sudden change in sound of the sophomore album Arte Novecento, the leading Italian atmospheric metal group Novembre is back with the next album. The gently subtle touches from the previous release are replaced with a direction that could be initially witnessed in the debut album Wish I Could Dream Again - contrast between two polar parts - crushing Death Metal with ferocious growls and mellow, often acoustic, passages. However, Classica is not a return to the roots, and songs sound drastically different, yet keep that touch, which Novembre are instantly recognised for.

The San Francisco Bay Area rock scene of the late '60s was one that encouraged radical experimentation and discouraged the type of mindless conformity that's often plagued corporate rock. When one considers just how different Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead sounded, it becomes obvious just how much it was encouraged. In the mid-'90s, an album as eclectic as Abraxas would be considered a marketing exec's worst nightmare. But at the dawn of the 1970s, this unorthodox mix of rock, jazz, salsa, and blues proved quite successful. Whether adding rock elements to salsa king Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va," embracing instrumental jazz-rock on "Incident at Neshabur" and "Samba Pa Ti," or tackling moody blues-rock on Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman," the band keeps things unpredictable yet cohesive…

Trumpeter Jonah Jones was a hot property in late 1957 due to his hit rendition of "On the Street Where You Live." This follow-up LP had an equally big hit in "Baubles, Bangles and Beads," making Jones a household name for a decade. With shuffling support from pianist George Rhodes, bassist John Brown and drummer Harold Austin, Jones was able to make a lucrative living playing and singing music that did not differ much from what he would have been performing anyway. Other highlights of the LP (which consists of 12 songs from plays) include "The Surrey With the Fringe On Top," "Just In Time" and "I Could Have Danced All Night."

Socrates - initially known by the more unwieldy moniker Socrates Drank the Conium - were one of the best-known Greek rock bands of the early to mid-‘70s, and one of the few to earn a reputation in the rest of the world. On their first three albums they pursued a tough but technically proficient brand of post-psychedelic hard rock that occasionally revealed a touch of prog influence, but on their 1976 release, Phos, the band underwent a major stylistic shift, and embraced those prog leanings with open arms. The main facilitator for this change was famed keyboardist Vangelis, whose prog ensemble Aphrodite's Child preceded Socrates as Greece's rock ambassadors to the wider world. Vangelis came on board as producer and keyboardist for Phos (also contributing a little of his compositional talent), enabling Socrates to make the leap from thinking man's hard rock to artier, more complex song structures and arrangements. …