From Papillon et la fleur to L’Horizon chimérique, Gabriel Fauré has created some one-hundred melodies which have transformed this French art form into the very pinnacle of musical expression.

Schopfheim is located in the valley of the meadow, which looks for its way into the Rhine from the Feldberg. The Black Forest begins soon after the local border, on the other side of the river, the Dinkelberg reaches the cantonal border of Basel-Stadt as a wooded mountain range towards the High Rhine area. A peaceful corner of Central Europe, a place of tendential calm.

French lutenist Florent Marie presents a collection of solo lute works by Giovanni Antonio Terzi (fl. 1580-1600). Terzi was a composer addressing modernity, as well as being a true European.

“His music filled me with the urge to connect with the world,” Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith says of Emile Mosseri. She first heard his work while watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco; just minutes in, she paused it to look up who did the score and wrote to him immediately. “I love Emile’s ability to create melodies that feel magically scenic and familiar like they are reminding you of the innocence of loving life.”

Carney was born in Hampshire, England but moved to Ireland at the age of ten. Carney signed a record deal at age 16. In 2017, Carney released a song titled Winter. In 2019, Carney released her debut full-length album titled Bare. In December 2020, she released a full cover LP of Radiohead’s The Bends.

For the members of Canadian band Stars, Capelton Hill is a place where things don’t change.

Jules Verne was the inspiration for Offenbach’s opéra-féerie, premiered in 1875. The Parisian craze for this type of musical extravaganza stemmed from its impressive stage effects: for Le Voyage dans la Lune, two ballets and some twenty sets took the audience from the Earth to the Moon, successively recreating the Paris Observatory, a working blast furnace and the crater of an erupting volcano. The piece is studded with zany characters and imaginary places: a lunar landscape, a glass palace, mother-of-pearl galleries, etc. The producers even borrowed a dromedary and an ostrich from the zoo at the Jardin d’Acclimatation! To accompany this theatrical display, Offenbach composed a series of colourful, picturesque hit numbers, wittily and energetically performed here by a team of enthusiastic soloists.The Chœur et Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie are placed under the subtle and precise direction of Pierre Dumoussaud.

Slang's debut is a force of nature that came, seemingly, out of nowhere - lyricist/singer/guitarist Drew Grow and drummer/singer Janet Weiss started the band over a decade ago in Portland, OR, both having spent more than half their lives dedicated to making and performing music.

Mellow Moon is the debut album from Alfie Templeman - an album that "feels like something of a miracle, landing somewhere between an otherworldly trip and a joy-filled ode to life back on earth". Like all journeys, the change in mood is palpable throughout Mellow Moon, with songs like the nostalgic '3D Feelings' or 'Broken', which is about "all the little wobbles of being a teen and figuring yourself out,” that bristle with the energy of a life being lived again.

At the beginning of the 17th century, music in Italy underwent a radical change. From the first experimental attempts in Florence to revive the musical practice of Greek antiquity, which had not been handed down in detail, the genre of the monody developed, in which the singer could finally express all the nuances of the text (the "affects"), freed from the strict constraints of polyphony. To accompany this monophonic singing, new types of plucked instruments emerged, such as the archlute and the theorbo, characterised especially by their powerful bass registers and intense resonances. The new expressive demands invited playing with timbres, (de)crescendi and agogics to convincingly portray human passions, elements that were also applied to purely instrumental music, as in the works on this recording. The rigour of polyphony gave way to a style based more on improvisation, an aspect particularly important to Luca Pianca in his interpretation of solo works for archlute and theorbo by Piccinini, Kapsberger, Melli and Raimondo.

Hagberg has a unique voice on his instruments, blending Eastern inspiration with the Scandinavian sounds in a wonderful way. Anders Hagberg creates a unique world of sound.From quiet wonder to expressive, explosive exuberance.

"An eagle whose wings are grown", according to his father Alessandro, the young Scarlatti left his native Naples for Venice, "escorted only by his own ability". Born in Italy in 1685, Domenico Scarlatti spent the majority of his career in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families – with the latter appointment enabling him to devote his full attention towards composing for the harpsichord. This unusual cultural background accounts for why the Italian’s music, though contemporary with that of Bach and Handel, differs so much in comparison; Spanish dance rhythms (such as the flamenco), and folk tunes with Moorish and gypsy-like flavours, indicate that day-by-day-street life was a great source of inspiration to Scarlatti.

"Jubilation vénitienne" is an invitation to celebrate joy with two outstanding composers: Antonio Caldara and Antonio Vivaldi. By establishing a dialogue between their two musical worlds, this program aims to recreate, in all it's diversity of colors, a concert in Baroque Venice where children's voices combine with the singing of the flautino, the oboe, the trumpet and the strings, in an explosion of joy and jubilation.

"…Jade Warrior combined Far Eastern and African influences with rock, jazz, blues, refined their music over the years in a top-class way, crossed the borders to classical music, world music, free improvisation, evoked wondrously concentrated, mystical atmospheric images, […] The album was digitally remastered, the sound is convincing, as a bonus there is an alternative version of the song 'Minnamoto's Dream'." (Good Times, June/July 2022)

Along with Gary Moore, Michael Schenker never quite reached the same level of acclaim stateside as he did in Europe (and other parts of the world), despite possessing exceptional, and quite influential, six-string skills. Schenker was born on January 10, 1955 in Sarstedt, West Germany, and it was his older brother, Rudolf, who sparked the youngster's interest in guitar at an early age.