It's virtually impossible to sum up John Lennon's entire career in 21 tracks, but this Yoko-approved soundtrack to Andrew Solt's 1988 documentary makes a fairly impressive try. Evenly split between his Beatles and solo periods, this collection paints a complex picture of a man whose music was by turns reflective…

After winning the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in 2015 and releasing lauded albums of works by Debussy and Mozart, the "unequivocally brilliant" (The Telegraph) pianist SeongJin Cho now explores Schubert, Liszt, and Berg. The new album features Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy and Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor.

This truly international ensemble drawn from Japan, Germany and the USA discloses a Newly Planted Thuringian Pleasure Garden virtually unknown on disc. Johann Rudolf Able (1625-73) worked at St Blasius Church in Muhlhausen (a predecessor there of JS Bach), but his stylistic lineage is clearly from Venice and Gabrieli, via Schiitz. Into his ‘garden’ Ahle ‘transplanted… new spiritual musical plants with three to ten and more parts’. The selection here uses four lucid voices, a cornetto and four trombones, a pair of violins and continue organ.

Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenth-century German authors, early Romantics, Biedermeier poets, and Heine. The Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition presents all Schubert’s Lieder, over 700 songs, grouped according to the poets who inspired him. Thanks to the Bärenreiter’s Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (New Schubert Edition), Tübingen, which uses primary sources, the performers have been able to benefit from the most recent research of the editorial team. For the first time, the listener and interested reader can follow Schubert’s textual alterations and can appreciate the importance the written word had for the composer. The project’s artistic advisor is the pianist Ulrich Eisenlohr, who has chosen German-speaking singers who represent the élite of today’s young German Lieder singers.

John Dawson Winter III (February 23, 1944 – July 16, 2014), known as Johnny Winter, was an American blues guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, singer, and producer. Best known for his high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and 1970s, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters…

While the young Tolonen had already made a name for himself in Tasavallan Presidentti, the nineteen-year old really made it big with his 1971 solo debut Tolonen! Named album of the year in Finland at the time, the instrumental prog rock album made it to the local top ten and was licensed for release in several countries.
On Tolonen! he showcases his skills as musician rather than a lead guitarist, and he does so in a pretty unique way. Instead of using all of his studio time lying on top of some heavy blues based riffing - ornamenting the music with high soaring fiery guitar solos, which he also does on occasion, he decides to weave a series of intricate melodic string plays, creating a magical world that wouldn't be out of place in the sort of movie, where unicorns and phoenixes roam…

Bradley's was a legendary New York City jazz club that for 25 years acted as a gathering place for many of the Big Apple's top musicians, a place to hang out. In 1996, the Kenny Barron Trio dug in before the illustrious audience and played at their best. Barron and drummer Ben Riley were members of Sphere, a quartet (with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse and bassist Buster Williams) that initially paid tribute to Thelonious Monk. On this trio set, "The Only One" is based on Monk's "Hackensack," Barron takes Thelonious' "Shuffle Boil" as an unaccompanied piano solo, and the threesome jams on "Well You Needn't." The other two songs, the standard "You Don't Know What Love Is" and Barron's "Twilight Song," are not connected to the pianist-composer but are excellent examples of the trio's close interplay and ability to think as one…