Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
This Caravan record has a very good balance between electric guitars and electric viola: they are often played simultaneously.

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
Amazingly mature debut from CARAVAN is among the best British psychedelia albums of the era.

Excellent addition to any Prog Rock music collection.
Once again Breathless tests the true admirer of Camel and succeeds. If you are a Caravan fan then Sinclair's influence will be highly pleasing.

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
This is the first place to start with their music, absolutely containing the very best version of "The Snow Goose"….

Excellent addition to any Rock music collection.
It was interesting to listen what kind of result comes from the musical vision of King Crimson’s court lyricist and its musicians without the presence of Robert Fripp…

The Arcana label continues its fruitful collaboration with the Archi di Santa Cecilia, the Rome-based ensemble formed from members of the famous Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. The ensemble is conducted by Luigi Piovano, the orchestra’s principal cellist and since 2007 a regular partner in a cello-piano duo with Sir Antonio Pappano, its chief conductor (their recording of the Brahms cello sonatas will be released later this year). The Archi di Santa Cecilia now offer us a brand new recording devoted to Mozart: the famous Serenade Eine kleine Nachtmusik K525 and the less familiar but equally brilliant Divertimenti K136, K137 and K138.

Of the five English composers featured, only two are really known at all Coleridge-Taylor for Hiawatha and Boughton for The Immortal Hour but all wrote wonderful music in Romantic style rather under the shadow of Elgar, Delius, other prominent figures. Rosalind Ellicott had much success and performances in the 1880s before moving from orchestral to chamber music; Forrester was less prolific, concentrating on his teaching career, but has a fine impressionist voice. Warner was very well known as a violist and member of the London String Quartet; he was very busy as a composer with several chamber works, two operas and over a hundred songs to his name. The Trio featured here won the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Prize. Trio Anima Mundi is one of Australias finest chamber trios; since its founding in 2008 it has won several international awards and made special efforts to unearth and perform forgotten but worthy works as well as the newest pieces of today. Their previous Divine Art album won rapturous acclaim.

Aside from his only opera Fidelio, Beethovens general link with the theater in Vienna came about largely with incidental music or songs to be inserted into the works of other composers- insertion arias. Konig Stephan was written to celebrate the politically significant opening of a new theatre in Pest, its triumphant mood honoring the ruling Austrian Emperor. Standard Bearer of female heroism Leonore Prohaska is commemorated with a Soldiers Chorus and a Romance with harp accompaniment. In Friedrich von Matthissons poem Opferlied (Sacrificial Song), a young man prays to Zeus to bestow upon him beauty and goodness in youth and old age. Two of Beethovens four settings are heard on this wide-ranging programme.

Very appropriately, Valentina Naforniţă devotes half of her debut album released on Outhere to the composer who makes the highest vocal demands, with his incomparable dramatic complexity and inspired musical invention. Ever since she sang her first Papagena as a new ensemble member of the Vienna State Opera in the autumn of 2011, she has repeatedly enjoyed enormous success performing Mozart’s great female roles, which are so challenging in their diversity. The charismatic Moldovan soprano impresses with an astonishingly wide palette of expression and emotion. The second part of the CD is devoted to the Slavonic repertory.

Belated Christmas presents for fans of the late, great Brit-jazz tenorist Tubby Hayes as Universal have announced the arrival of selected remastered albums.

Take a moment to tune in to the tasteful playing of guitarist Amanda Monaco on her new effort “Glitter.” Employing a wide palette of styles and sounds, this gifted instrumentalist makes a bold and entertaining artistic statement with her stunning musicianship and her collection of original compositions. Amanda shines brightly as the bandleader and surrounds herself with some of the heaviest cats on the scene, including organist Gary Versace, drummer Matt Wilson, and baritone saxophone sensation Lauren Sevian. While the session is definitely straight ahead and features some hard swinging highlights, at other moments “Glitter” is also elegantly lyrical and brilliantly evocative of a more modern jazz sensibility.

On this compelling first release it revolves around Debussy’s 1915 Sonata for flute, viola and harp and its influence, most directly felt in Takemitsu’s shimmering ‘And then I knew ‘twas wind’. Debussy himself had been profoundly moved by his encounter with music of the East and in his last works was emphasizing tone-colour, texture and timbre and a different kind of temporal flow. In this music, the elasticity of Debussy’s feeling for time (as Heinz Holliger observed) pointed far into the future and to the works of Boulez. And indeed to the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, whose ‘Garden of Joys and Sorrows’ makes its own reckoning with orient and occident. Gubaidulina has said that she considers herself “a daughter of two worlds, whose soul lives in the music of the East and the West”. Produced by Manfred Eicher in the Lugano Studio.