Wagner’s rarely performed early comic opera, based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, enjoys its Spanish debut in a new production by director Kasper Holten. The lively score boasts clear Italian, French and Weberian influences that pre-date the composer’s mature voice, yet the music continually delights with the unmistakable emergence of Wagner’s precocious genius. His adaptation of the Bard’s play reflects the rebellious mood of a Revolutionary Germany, vindicating sensual love and attacking the fanatical repression of sexuality by a puritanical and hypocritical authority. Ivor Bolton conducts a vibrant cast featuring English baritone and Cardiff Singer of the World Lieder Prize-winner Christopher Maltman, Turkish-Viennese tenor and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Ilker Arcayürek and Germany’s hottest Wagnerian leading lady, Manuela Uhl.

Could this actually be European death metal's bid for a pop culture coup? In Flames already has a reputation as one of the best, most melodic death metal bands to come to power in the Euro-metal regime that has swept through countries like Sweden and Norway since the early to mid-'90s. However, with Reroute to Remain, Strömblad and the gang have now unexpectedly announced that they are also undoubtedly the most experimental of their brethren, and furthermore, that they have set their sights not just on broader horizons, but perhaps even complete world domination as well. Maybe that sounds like a huge exaggeration, but even one spin of the 14 songs here will prove that it very possibly may not be. It's obvious that the band has been listening heavily to the popular American metal (nu-metal, rap-metal, etc.) acts of the moment, because most of their venturing heads in that direction…

Vijay Iyer presents a powerful new trio, in which he is joined by two key figures in creative music, Tyshawn Sorey and Linda May Han Oh. “We have an energy together that is very distinct. It has a different kind of propulsion, a different impulse and a different spectrum of colours”. Repertoire on UnEasy, recorded at Oktaven Audio Studio in Mount Vernon, New York in December 2019, includes Iyer originals written over a span of 20 years, plus Gerri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song” and a radical recasting of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”

The new album from the quartet led by one of jazz’s innovators, drummer Andrew Cyrille, carries the story forward from the 2016 release The Declaration of Musical Independence, a recording which Down Beat hailed as “an unabashed exploration into time, pulse space and atmosphere…ambitious yet simple, rich yet stripped-down, challenging yet infinitely satisfying.” Bill Frisell and Ben Street remain from the Declaration line-up with David Virelles taking the piano role. Each of the players has space for improvisational expression – and Frisell and Virelles also contribute material - but it is Cyrille’s communicative sensibility and what the New York Times called his “watchful, flowing pulse” that guides the band.

Dreamland is the second volume in Joni Mitchell's self-compiled series of "theme" retrospectives. The first, issued on the Geffen label, was entitled The Beginning of Survival. It focused on songs that dug deep into social, cultural, political, and environmental themes, as "commentaries on the world in which we live." Dreamland was compiled from her Asylum, Reprise, and Nonesuch years and focuses, for lack of a better term, on the jazzier side of her catalog musically, including songs with lyrics are all highly imagistic in their makeup. Most are dealing with love and life in the process of moving through it. From "Free Man in Paris" and the title track, to "In France They Kiss on Main Street," "Come in From the Cold," "Help Me," and of course, "You Turn Me on I'm a Radio," these songs turn the tide for the listener from the place of observing love to the terrain of being caught up in it…

A four-disc boxed set, Aftershock: The Island Years, gathers up one of the most successful runs of albums from thrash metal legends Anthrax. Featuring 1985's Spreading the Disease, 1987's Among the Living, 1988's State of Euphoria, and 1990's Persistence of Time, the set follows the initial reign of singer Joey Belladonna as the band ripped their way through the second half of the '80s on Island Records…

Gotthard, a Swiss hard rock band who sing in English, are one of the most successful musical acts ever to arise from Switzerland. Gotthard sold over two million albums worldwide, one million of them sold in Switzerland alone (a country of less than eight million inhabitants, keep in mind), as practically all of the band's albums were Swiss chart-toppers. Gotthard were also popular in Germany, where the band's albums regularly charted.
"Gotthard" (1992) is their debut studio album.

Music for Lonely Housewives on the Audio Fidelity imprint (mastered for this CD by Steve Hoffman) is a first of its kind themed collection. This release is a highly original, inspired, and altogether clever blending of Pop, R&B, Jazz and Rock tunes in an album that has that "it factor." It's a cool soundtrack for the lifestyle of the contemporary housewife (a group of women that has very recently come into the limelight in a very big way). Inspired by the hit TV show, this release features an awesome combination of complimentary musical styles, similar to a TV or film soundtrack. It features an all-star roster of artists like Cher, Dusty Springfield, Pat Benatar, Maria Maldaur, Gloria Gaynor and Julie London.

“But remember that song is a most powerful imitator of all things. It imitates the intentions and passions of the soul as well as words…By the same power, when it imitates the celestials, it also wonderfully arouses our spirit upwards to the celestial influence and the celestial influence downwards to our spirit.” Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life (1489), Book 3, Chapter XXI

It was in 2018 when Ksenia took the decision to record the 24 Capricci by Paganini together with the 4 Studi discovered by Danilo Prefumo and, after investigating their history, philology, compositive pattern, lyric-harmonic and executive features, after having performed all the 24 Capricci in various recitals. Her studies brought her to consider each Capriccio for its own specific compositive and executive characteristics, connecting at the same time one Capriccio to the other: that’s why she performs them in an innovative sequence whose purpose is to emphasize the stylistic and harmonic similarities which reveal the composer’s personality in his research of sonorities linked to the technical virtuosity and the sound effects of the instrument.