Amy Winehouse was one of the U.K.'s flagship vocalists during the 2000s. While the British press and tabloids seemed to focus on her rowdy behavior and tragic end, fans and critics alike embraced her rugged charm, brash sense of humor, and distinctively soulful and jazzy vocals. Her platinum-selling, Mercury Prize-nominated album Frank (2003) elicited comparisons ranging from Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan to Macy Gray and Lauryn Hill, introducing her unmistakable voice and deeply personal songwriting to the masses. However, it wasn't until 2006 that Winehouse truly landed on the global stage with her sophomore full-length, Back to Black. Teamed with producer Mark Ronson, she crafted a nostalgic, throwback sound heard on hit singles "Rehab" and "You Know I'm No Good." One of the best-selling albums in U.K.

This series of CDs by Tactus and Modo Antiquo represents the first complete recording of the cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi. Up until now, these works have appeared only sporadically on record, yet they constitute quite an important body of works in Vivaldi’s total production. Dedicated exclusively to female voices, the cantatas have here been divided according to the classifications used in the Ryom catalogue: cantatas for soprano and continuo, cantatas for contralto and continuo, cantatas for soprano and instruments, cantatas for contralto and instruments. Modo Antiquo has approached this first complete recording of the cantatas by Vivaldi with full respect for the original texts and the performance practices of the period.

Having already attracted attention for his exceptional gifts, Bach entered the service of the Weimar court at the age of twenty-three. This was the start of the period known as his ‘early maturity’, in which his formal and expressive experiments reflect a significant interest in French music and ‘la belle danse’. The close intertwining of French and German styles is the dominant feature of this third volume in Benjamin Alard’s recording of the complete organ and harpsichord works.

Orpheus Nine emerged with an instant classic in 2017's "Transcendental Circus". While the centerpiece is a six-part, nearly-22-minute title track, O9 deftly balances virtuosity with emotion and melody in every one of the album's beautifully crafted songs. Listeners to this very impressive debut have cited elements of ELP, King Crimson, Rush, Saga, Styx, Genesis, Frank Zappa, Gentle Giant, Spock's Beard, The Flower Kings, Yes, Marillion, Kansas, Echolyn, Glass Hammer, and Return to Forever - yet any past influence quickly yields to the fresh and original sound of a band focused on future possibilities.

The Japanese pianist, Yukio Yokoyama, took up the piano in early childhood, showing an early talent for the instrument and for composition. He played already as a child pieces of his own composition and performed with orchestras both in Japan and abroad. He was introduced to Herbert von Karajan and Mstislav Rostropovich at a young age, who announced that the child should dedicate himself to music. At the age of 12 he started studying piano under Jun Date and composition under Masayuki Nagatomi. In 1984, he won the first prize in the piano division of the All Japan Student Music Concours sponsored by the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. He entered the high school associated to the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, and in the following year went to study at Conservatoire national superieur de musique de Paris with a scholarship from the French Government. There, he studied under Jacques Rouvier, Vlado Perlemuter and others. In 1989 he won prizes at the Busconi International Concours and the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibeaud Concours. In 1990 he graduated from the Paris Conservatoire with grants of Premiere Prix in piano and chamber music. The same year, at the age of 19, he realized the impressive achievement of becoming the youngest-ever Japanese entrant to become the second finalist in the Chopin International Piano Competition, and winning 3rd prize (no first prize was allocated this year) from the Chopin International Piano Competition and also the Sonata prize.

From his first appearance on the radar back at the turn of the century, when a handful of Danish blues pub-crawlers discovered a diamond in the rough on the circuit of Copenhagen, Thorbjørn Risager's meteoric rise has rarely allowed him the time to look back over his shoulder. Instead, for this critically acclaimed songwriter, once-in-a-generation singer, expressive guitarist, and bandleader of the mighty Black Tornado, it has been a career with his eyes fixed on the horizon, the next town, the next show, the next song, the next album.
"I can't believe that it's been 20 years since we started on this great journey," says Risager, as he looks back on a career that has seen him storm the prestigious European and British Blues Awards, take the music to over 20 countries and held his own on stages with legends like Buddy Guy. "We're so thrilled to celebrate our anniversary with this collection of songs from the last two decades."

When the Siberian-born ‘Arctic Circle Pianist’ Ekaterina Litvintseva heard “Blumenleben” (‘Life of Flowers’) for the first time, she immediately resolved to find out more about the life and music of Dora Pejačević (1885-1923). This resolution prompted her to investigate an extraordinary corpus of music, remarkable not least for its sheer diversity, which she has attempted to convey in this selection of Pejačević’s piano output. Among 57 extant works, 24 are scored for solo piano; there would surely have been many more in both categories had she not died of kidney failure on 5 March 1923, aged 37, having suffered complications in giving birth to her first child.Pejačević was born in Budapest in 1885 into the Croatian aristocracy. She grew up on the family estate of Našice (in the region of Slavonia in Croatia) before taking her musical studies more seriously in Zagreb. Her early output shows how well she had mastered the Romantic idiom of character pieces by Mendelssohn, Schumann and Grieg, but her voice begins to emerge in the “Six Fantasiestücke Op.17” of 1903. From two years later, the “Blumenleben” bring the character of each chosen the innocent snowdrop, the erotic rose, the mournful chrysanthemum – with a refined melodic imagination and rare economy of thought: her Mendelssohnian sympathies lead her only to use as many notes as are needed.

Percussion concertos are more common than they used to be, but HK Gruber, whose background includes both avant-garde ensembles and mainstream orchestral playing, may be the only composer to have written more than one. Both of the works here are dense but quite entertaining. They were written some years apart; Rough Music dates from 1982-1983, while into the open…, had its premiere in 2015, in the BBC Proms performance recorded here. Rough Music is perhaps the easier introduction to Gruber's idiom, which includes a lot of percussion, even in other works.

Resonance Lines, a term borrowed loosely from physics, refers to the energy emitted or absorbed by an atom as it transitions between different energy states. This is a unique and innate quality for each type of atom that can only be measured and observed under the right enabling circumstances. An ideal artistic collaboration feels like the discovery and realization of deeply held potential for shared creativity—a sympathetic resonance or surge of energy in the colloquial sense—that is revealed when the right conditions are in place. It may feel lucky or it may feel destined, and in special cases, the 'resonating' artists are able to nurture and develop their complementary qualities with lasting effect. This album is a collection of music grown of such pairings, collaborations between composers and cellists joined by shared experiences that lead to creative sparks, unique musical gestures, and new sound worlds.

Joe Nosek fell in love with the blues when he was a boy, but it was vintage Chess Records singles and the blues 78s of the 1920s and '30s that captivated him. When the vocalist and harmonica player put together the Cash Box Kings in the early 2000s, he named them after a now defunct magazine that charted the juke box hits of the '40s and patterned their sound on the early blues records that captivated him. The music on Holler and Stomp pays tribute to the country sounds that influenced the blues in the early days of recording with a mix of originals and covers that sound like they're 50 years old. "That's My Gal" is a variation on Slim Harpo's "Scratch My Back," with Paterson's reverb-drenched guitar and Oscar Wilson's sly vocal contributing to the retro feel…

Sparkling new accounts of Schubert’s violin-and-piano music from two luminaries of the Finnish period-instrument scene.
The Bulgarian violinist Zefira Valova graduated from the National Music Academy of her native Sofia, Bulgaria, before specialising in Baroque violin studies with Lucy van Dael. While still based in her homeland, having founded Bulgaria’s only annual early-music festival (Sofia Baroque Arts Festival) she is a frequent soloist with and guest leader of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra under its founder-director Aapo Häkkinen, who swaps the conductor’s platform on this occasion for a seat at a gentle, plangent-sounding fortepiano from 1820 of Viennese manufacture – ideally suited to the repertoire at hand.

The Spanish master guitarist Paco de Lucía, whose death anniversary will be celebrated for the seventh time in 2021, is the focus of the new album by the Eos Guitar Quartet (Julio Azcano, Marcel Ege, David Sautter, Michael Winkler). For the four musicians, his music, his innovative power and not least their personal contact with him were a constant source of inspiration.

New York-based guitarists Jack Petruzzelli and Cameron Greider have played with a Who’s Who of rock and pop artists from Patti Smith and Chris Cornell to Joan Baez and Rufus Wainwright.

Out of all the Beatles, John Lennon had the most interesting – and frustrating – solo career. Lennon was capable of inspired, brutally honest confessional songwriting and melodic songcraft; he also had an undying love of straight-ahead rock & roll. But the extremes, both in his music and his life, were what made him fascinating. Where Paul McCartney was content to be a rock star, Lennon dabbled in everything from revolutionary politics to the television talk show circuit during the early '70s. After releasing a pair of acclaimed albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, in the early '70s, Lennon sunk into an infamous "lost weekend" where his musical output was decidedly uneven and his public behavior was often embarrassing. Halfway through the decade, he sobered up and retired from performing to become a house-husband and father.

"Waiting For The Sirens' Call" is the 3rd single from their eighth studio album.
Rising from the ashes of the legendary British post-punk unit Joy Division, New Order triumphed over tragedy to emerge as one of the most acclaimed bands of the 1980s; embracing the electronic textures and disco rhythms of the underground club culture many years in advance of its contemporaries, the group's pioneering fusion of new wave aesthetics and dance music successfully bridged the gap between the two worlds, creating a distinctively thoughtful and oblique brand of synth pop appealing equally to the mind, body, and soul.