180 Gram Vinyl! Blues-Rock Guitar Wizard! Country-Flavored Picking! Blistering Rock-Edged Blues! Turbulent, Inspired Jamming! As Joe Bonamassa grows his reputation as one of the world’s greatest guitar players, he is also evolving into a charismatic blues-rock star and singer-songwriter of stylistic depth and emotional resonance. His ability to connect with live concert audiences is transformational.

Barroco Andino began in early 1974, when Jaime Soto León and a group of young musicians decided to create a band that merged musical elements of European classical culture with sounds and rhythms typical of Latin America.

A Broken Frame is the second studio album by English electronic music band Depeche Mode. It was released on 27 September 1982 by Mute Records. The album was written entirely by Martin Gore and was recorded after the departure of Vince Clarke, who had left to form Yazoo with singer Alison Moyet. Alan Wilder was part of a second band tour in the United Kingdom prior to the release of A Broken Frame, but had not officially joined yet and does not appear on the album. It peaked at number 8 on the UK album charts.

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
Congreso are another band I was introduced to on Progarchives, and one I took an almost instant liking to.

Essential: A masterpiece of progressive-rock music.
"Blops" or "Locomotora (Locomotive)" is the third and final album of the Chilean band Los Blops. It was recorded in 1972 and released in 1973.

Excellent addition to any prog-rock music collection.
"Del Volar De Las Palomas ("From flying pigeons")" or "Blops" is the second album of Chilean Folk-Rock group "Los Blops", published in 1971.

Excellent addition to any prog-rock music collection.
Appearing Chilean Hippie Hymn "Los Momentos"
Los Blops’ first album is without a doubt the most engaging and interesting of their three official studio releases from the early seventies.

Respighis orchestral works are some of the most popular in the mainstream repertoire. His output of piano music, by contrast, is as good as unknown, and this new Toccata Classics series will be the first ever to present it all: original works and transcriptions alike, for solo piano, piano four hands and two pianos. This first instalment crowns his earliest keyboard compositions with the magisterial Three Preludes on Gregorian Melodies, miniature Lisztian tone-poems presented with Busonian grandeur.

In the last years of his life, the composer, violinist and swordsman Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) laboured at a vast cycle of sonatas for solo violin. The resulting manuscript offers the most important composition for solo violin after Bach and, at six hours in duration, the largest integrated work for the instrument. This first complete recording is based on a fresh study of the source and includes a number of works deciphered from Tartinis shorthand and overlooked in earlier editions. These Little Sonatas tread a delicate line between Baroque formality and proto-Romantic passion, occasionally illuminated with an echo of the folk-fiddling of his Slovenian homeland.

In the history of music, György Kurtág is a figure apart. Born in Hungary in 1926, he stood aside from the great ideological movements of his time and created his own personal language in solitude, thinking of music as he put it, "as an ongoing search". But while doggedly independent, he was also a man of culture whose language developed in the shadow of two great teachers: Bartók and Beethoven, the former following on largely from the latter. A champion of the small form, Kurtág also drew inspiration (when he wasn't revisiting them explicitly) from Bach, Schubert and Schumann.

A dramatic symphonic journey through T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", recorded live at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, May 2016.

With his opera The Diary of Anne Frank (1968/69), by virtue of the subject alone Grigory Frid could be sure of attracting attention beyond the borders of Russia. The remaining enormous oeuvre by the composer, covering mainly instrumental works, songs, radio and film music, still remains to be discovered and treated in depth. Both prior to and after the collapse of the Communist USSR, Frid was awarded the highest honours, e.g. the title of Artist of Merit (1986) and the Moscow Prize (1996). If it is probably not erroneous to view Frids aesthetic position in a propinquity to Dmitri Shostakovich, on the one hand, and in the environment of his contemporaries a generation younger such as Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke. As in the cases of these composers, Frids music is also positioned in a field of tension between following the great Russian tradition and the quest for possibilities of expression in keeping with new, modern and international trends.

Ko Matsushita, born in 1962, approaches choral music in many ways. He himself composes and arranges for choir and his works are performed worldwide. At the same time, he is active as a conductor and artistic director of numerous choirs, which have always gained recognition foroutstanding performances at international competitions. Matsushita has received several awards, including the “Robert Edler Prize for Choral Music” in 2005 – the first Asian conductor to do so. Under the direction of Georg Grün, the KammerChor Saarbrücken, one of Germany's leading chamber choirs, dedicates this recording to Matsushita's sacred works for a cappella choir. In addition, the Lieder cycle op. 6 by Max Reger and the famous choral transcription Im Abendrot by Clytus Gottwald after the Adagietto from the 5th Symphony by Gustav Mahler can be heard.

During his years in Vienna, Mozart wrote a series of keyboard concertos in which the soloist faces off for the first time against an orchestral part of symphonic aspirations. The famous D minor Concerto reveals this to particularly impressive effect, its dark passion and drama setting it apart from the rest of the series. The popular “Coronation” Concerto is geared more to the brilliance of its keyboard writing and impresses, rather, by dint of its radiance and charm. These two contrary works are at the same time quite complementary, in the sense that they portray the spectrum of Mozart’s art: drama and passion, glamour and grace.

Sechs Klavierstucke, Op. 118 by Johannes Brahms is one of the most difficult works for an artist to perform in terms of interpretation. The mood of sadness, reflection and melancholy, which runs through almost all the links of the cycle, prompts both the performer and the listener to reflect. The Sonata for Piano and Viola in F minor, Op. 120 No. 1, coming from the late period of Brahms' works too, is also a demanding composition. The piece contains elements of the classical sonata form, but also harmonically advanced harmonic and melodic sections typical of the late Romanticism. Both works by Brahms, which you can listen to on the album of Zofia Antes and Aleksandra Batog, reveal a series of musical phenomena symptomatic only for the late works of the composer.