"La Gloria, Roma e Valore" by Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier (1662 -1700) is a solemn cantata for the inauguration of the new Venetian ambassador in Rome. Whoever thought that this is only ephemeral baroque music, is wrong: Often the composers showed what they were able to do, because unlike for example in the Opera House, in the audience were musical experts and potential constituents. The protégé of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni has really created a small musical jewel, which was convincingly recorded by Fabio Missaggia and I Musicali Affetti.

Another installment in Collectables' The Ultimate Christmas Album series, volume four gathers a mix of well-known and offbeat holiday tunes, including Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas," the Platters' "Winter Wonderland," and Perry Como's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas." Brook Benton's "You're All I Want for Christmas," Percy Faith's "Christmas Is," and Otis Redding's "Merry Christmas Baby" are some of the collection's soulful highlights, while Santo & Johnny's "Twistin' Bells" and Stan Freberg's "Christmas Dragnet" add some novelty to the festivities. Though it's a somewhat uneven collection, The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 4: WCBS 101.1 has enough interesting and classic moments to make it worthwhile for anyone looking to go beyond the season's basic music.

Released a year after Eat a Peach, Brothers and Sisters shows off a leaner brand of musicianship, which, coupled with a pair of serious crowd-pleasers, "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica," helped drive it to the top of the charts for a month and a half and to platinum record sales. This was the first album to feature the group's new lineup, with Chuck Leavell on keyboards and Lamar Williams on bass, as well as Dickey Betts' emergence as a singer alongside Gregg Allman. The tracks appear on the album in the order in which they were recorded, and the first three, up through "Ramblin' Man," feature Berry Oakley - their sound is rock-hard and crisp. The subsequent songs with Williams have the bass buried in the mix, and an overall muddier sound…

That it took nearly a year to record Voulez-Vous is an indicator of the creative and personal constraints in which the four members of ABBA found themselves at the end of the '70s. Their sixth album coincided with the marital split between Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus and the massively shifting currents in popular music, with disco, which had been on the wane, suddenly undergoing a renaissance thanks to the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever. Thus, about half of Voulez-Vous shows the heavy influence of the Bee Gees from their megahit disco era. This is shown not just in the fact that the backing track for the title song was cut at Criteria Studios in Miami, where the Bee Gees had cut Main Course, Children of the World, and most of the rest of their disco-era music, but through the funky beat that ran through much of the material…

The sixth album by New York's Holmes Brothers is another all-spirituals set - though not in the traditional sense of the word. Produced by pop singer Joan Osborne (before she was a superstar, Osborne woodshedded with the Brothers and developed a fine rootsy singing style of her own), who was there in the Manhattan trenches with the band, this set goes a long, long way to capturing raw, excruciating grooves. With the a trio of singers as soulful as any group Memphis or Motown ever produced, the Holmes Brothers take it to the gut each and every time. This set opens with Ben Harper's "Homeless Child," and let's just say after the deep, grease-fire funk the vocalizing creates, Harper should never play it again. This song now belongs to the Holmes Brothers…

Mozart's early piano sonatas have a disproportionate number of recordings given their relative importance in the composer's output. This might be so because they are relatively straightforward pieces that can be interpreted in any number of ways: they let pianists make their marks on the music. They can be made to look back to the harpsichord sonata era, be made proto-Beethovenian, or be played as pure Mozart in the classic delicate style. Pianist Lars Vogt's readings are distinctive and certainly justify his decision to present his own take. He balances detail and virtuosity, with zippy but graceful outer movements in the Piano Sonata in F major, K. 280, and Piano Sonata in B flat major, K. 281, that take just a bit of time when Vogt wants to bring out a specific point.

With much of Handel’s mature work now well represented on CD, his less familiar early music is proving increasingly popular fare. The 100 or so chamber cantatas he wrote during his four years in Italy (1706-10) are a particularly rich resource. Dramatically striking, instrumentally adventurous and blessed with a profusion of glorious tunes, these cantatas are brimful with the sunny exuberance of a young composer delighted to show off his talents. Deborah York, best-known for her work with Philippe Herreweghe and Robert King, has chosen four suitably diverse pieces.