Roger Waters, co-founder and principal songwriter of Pink Floyd, fuses the epic and the personal in Roger Waters The Wall, a concert film that goes well beyond the stage. Based on the groundbreaking concept album, Roger Waters The Wall could be called a concept film: it's a state-of-the-art show that dazzles the senses, combined with an intensely personal road trip that deals with the loss Roger has felt throughout his life due to war. On stage and now on film, Waters has channeled his convictions into his art and his music. With Roger Waters The Wall, Waters – together with his fellow musicians and his creative collaborators – brings audiences an exultant ride of a rock and roll concert, and delivers an unforgettable, deeply emotional experience.

Among the different practices of the Renaissance, the act of singing to the accompaniment of the lyre held a special symbolic role, linked to the myth of Orpheus and to the divine figure of Apollo. With its origins in the mid-15th century, this recitation of epic and lyrical texts initially took the form of monophonic music accompanied by the lira da braccio. With the invention of the lirone in the years around 1500, the role of the accompaniment develops into the recitative style of the 1600s which led to the development of the earliest operas.

The transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque eras did not mark one sudden change of forms or styles, nor did it signal the end of what Claudio Monteverdi called the prima pratica, or the primary practice of Renaissance polyphony. However, a new emphasis on powerful emotional expressions became a central feature of what he dubbed the seconda pratica, which came to the fore with the development of opera, most notably in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607. Composers paid special attention to the innovations in the music of Venice, which eventually spread throughout Europe in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and such figures as Monteverdi, Antonio Lotti, and Antonio Caldara, long associated with the city, became exemplars of the new Venetian style, in both secular and sacred music.

With this volume 4 in a complete recording of Bach’s keyboard works whose ingenuity has been underlined by every reviewer (e.g. Gramophone, July 2020), Benjamin Alard continues to explore the Weimar period, known as that of his ‘early mastery’. After À la française, we turn to Italy, where the Vivaldian concerto reigned in Venice. The young Bach created here a wonderful space of freedom between the transcriber and the improviser. For ‘if transcription is a matter of freedom, it is also a matter of powerful imagination: each piece on this recording transports us into a Venetian universe that fascinated Bach as much as it inspired him’, as Benjamin Alard demonstrates on three exceptional instruments.

This is a crazy and consistently riotous two-disc set that features the Don Ellis Orchestra at its height. The 20-piece orchestra (with trumpeter Ellis doubling on drums along with a regular drummer and two percussionists) often used electronic devices (such as ring modulators) at the time to really distort its sound. When coupled with odd time signatures and such exuberant soloists as Ellis, trombonist Glenn Ferris, tenor saxophonist John Klemmer (showcased on the remarkable "Excursion II"), guitarist Jay Graydon, altoists Fred Selden and Lonnie Shetter, and tenor Sam Falzone, the results are quite memorable. Highlights of the date include "Final Analysis" (which contains a countless number of false endings), a bizarre rendition of "Hey Jude," and an often hilarious remake of "Pussy Wiggle Stomp." In 2005, the Wounded Bird label reissued this session on CD for the first time.

For this his third volume of works by Antoine Reicha, the pianist Ivan Ilic turns to one of the composer’s most extraordinary works, L’Art de varier, Op. 57. ‘The Art of Variation’ consists of fifty-seven variations on a theme (that the number of variations match the opus number is not a coincidence) and was composed in 1802 – 03, at the beginning of the six-year period which Reicha spent in Vienna, where he studied with Haydn and re-kindled his previous friendship with Beethoven. The set is remarkable for its scale and invention. Ivan Ilic describes the work as the missing link between Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations and Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli’ Variations, which was certainly influenced by Reicha’s work. The recording was made at Potton Hall in Suffolk, on a Steinway Model D grand piano.

The year 2021 marks the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, the French pianist, organist, critic and great Romantic composer. The cellist Astrig Siranossian, whose tribute album to Nadia Boulanger (Dear Mademoiselle, ALPHA635) recently attracted considerable attention, plays the first of his two cello concertos, composed in 1872, notable for the fact that it comprises a single movement in three sections, and for the thunderous irruption of the cello right at the start. She is accompanied by the Philharmonie Südwestfalen and its conductor Nabil Shehata, who is also an eminent double bass player – the principal of the Berlin Philharmonic in the 2000s – and deeply committed to Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, of which Astrig is also a member. The tribute continues with Saint-Saëns’s Symphony no.1 (one of five he wrote), composed when he was only eighteen. The famous Bacchanale, an oriental-flavoured dance from Act Three of his opera Samson et Dalila, completes the programme.