With a celebrated career encompassing five decades, Pinchas Zukerman reigns as one of today's most sought after and versatile musicians - violin and viola soloist, conductor, and chamber musician. He is renowned as a virtuoso, admired for the expressive lyricism of his playing, singular beauty of tone, and impeccable musicianship, which can be heard throughout his discography of over 100 albums.

Barbirolli made later recordings of all the works on this CD and these have become cornerstones of the catalogue. These are earlier recordings that he did with his own orchestra, the Halle, in the 1950s. To start with, the recording quality is pretty amazing. They were recorded on 35mm film tape rather than half inch recording tape by the Mercury team and have astonishing immediacy and amazingly lifelike. Barbirolli uses an organ in the finale of the Enigma Variations. The recording is a little bass heavy but this is a small caveat. For people who consider Barbirolli to be a bit indulgent as a conductor, these recordings may come as a surprise. The performances are very direct and nicely flowing. They therefore complement rather than compete with the later recordings. Of course, Barbirolli's later recording of the Cello Concerto with Jacqueline du Pre is a very famous and special rendition of the work. However, it is not without its detractors. Andre Navarra, by contrast, plays with golden tone. He plays gorgeously. Highly recommended.

One of the tastiest concoctions of the mid-'70s jazz-fusion era, Chain Reaction finds the Crusaders at the top of their form. The compositions are both accessible and memorable, and the playing is uniformly excellent. Guitarist Larry Carlton delivers some of his finest licks and funkified rhythm work. Wayne Henderson shows there is a place in fusion for the trombone. Wilton Felder does double duty, delivering smoking saxophone lines and funky bass riffs. Joe Sample's Fender Rhodes piano provides a solid chordal foundation and great solos. And the stickman, Stix Hooper, keeps the groove solid. The band employs a variety of rhythms and tempos, and gives the members plenty of room to strut their individual and collective stuff. In fact, "collective" may be the key word here, for this is the sound of a band, not just a group of guys thrown together for a recording session. Chain Reaction was one of the albums that helped lure young, rock and soul-oriented listeners over to check out the jazz side, and should not be missed by those interested in the more accessible, funky side of fusion.

With this amazing album, Dead Can Dance fully took the plunge into the heady mix of musical traditions that would come to define its sound and style for the remainder of its career. The straightforward goth affectations are exchanged for a sonic palette and range of imagination. Calling it "haunting" and "atmospheric" barely scratches even the initial surface of the album's power. The common identification of the duo with a consciously medieval European sound starts here – quite understandable, when one considers the mystic titles of songs, references to Latin, choirs, and other touches that make the album sound like it was recorded in an immense cathedral.

Demofoonte dates from the early Milan years of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787), long before the radical reform operas for which he is most famous and his break with opera seria and the librettos of Pietro Metastasio. Gluck arrived in the northern Italian city in 1737 and was mentored there by composer Giovanni Battista Sammartini. Though Sammartini primarily composed symphonies and music for the church, Milan boasted a vibrant opera scene, and Gluck soon formed an association with one of the city's up-and-coming opera houses, the Teatro Regio Ducal.

This is listed as the final installment in the Eroica’s Mendelssohn quartets series. It also happens to come on the heels of two brand new complete sets—one from the preeminent Emerson Quartet, the other from the pacesetting Pacifica Quartet. Comparisons to these ensembles, though probably unavoidable, are not particularly apt or instructive, for the Eroica is a period-instruments group dedicated to interpretations of 19th-century Romantic works that reflect as closely as possible the performance practices that would have been in vogue at the time the music was written.

Germany's Accent label has released a series of twin-CD sets featuring the Baroque flute recordings made by Barthold Kuijken, sometimes (as here) accompanied by his cello-playing brother Wieland. The originals date back to the late '70s, when Kuijken was one of the Dutch specialists who brought historical performance out of the too-precious phase, and they still sound good. This release pairs a 1979 set of French flute sonatas from the middle eighteenth century with a 1991 group of Italian works of the same period. The two discs, both recorded in Belgian churches, don't have exactly the same ambiance, but the pairing is an intelligent one, making this a good pick from among the various discs available.

This 6-CD set present the complete keyboard music (organ and harpsichord) of Holland’s most famous composer: Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.