He may have played second banana to Jerry Lewis and (later) Frank Sinatra, but whether he was in the studio or in front of a crowd, no one carried a song (or performance) quite like Dean Martin. Martin's interpretive skills were extraordinary, and he could go from the slickest of clowning to the smoothest of crooning in a heartbeat. Collected Cool, his first career-spanning box set, came along surprisingly late, but it's no less impressive for the late arrival. A four-disc set, it includes one disc of Capitol recordings (the '50s), one disc of Reprise recordings (the '60s through the '80s), one audio disc of a concert in Lake Tahoe from 1962, and a DVD featuring a London concert from 1983. The audio portion is an excellent selection of hits and neglected classics, with a few unreleased nuggets – all of which deserved the excavation. The 1962 show is riotous and very entertaining, with Martin repurposing standards into new songs like "Almost Like Losin' My Mind" (instead of being in love) and "I Love Tahoe" (instead of Paris). The 1983 show is slightly more staid, and features more of the country material Martin turned to later in his career. It's easy to wish that the earlier concert was available on video, especially since some of the jokes are visual and lost on an audio-only audience, but Collected Cool functions extremely well as the best possible overview of the aspects that made Dean Martin a star – his peerless voice and, equally, his distinctively cool and clowning way with a crowd.

In 2018, the Styriarte Festival in Graz launched, in collaboration with Zefiro, a project to rediscover the operatic output of the Styrian composer Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), Kapellmeister at the imperial court in Vienna for forty years, with the aim of restaging six of his nineteen operas, one per year. With a cast of Baroque vocal specialists, led by Monica Piccinini and Arianna Venditelli, this set of Dafne in lauro marks the beginning of a new series in which Arcana will release the recordings made in the course of the six-year cycle.

Silence Is Golden Review by James Christopher Monger
Billed as containing 60 Hits from the Chilled Generation, Sony Music's Silence Is Golden collection rounds up an evocative set of laid-back '60s nuggets primarily gleaned from the era's prosperous folk-rock scene. Highlights include classic rock radio fodder like the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" and Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence," as well as lesser known gems from the Move ("Flowers in the Rain"), Pentangle ("Light Flight"), and Honeybus ("I Can't Let Maggie Go").

It's a New Vibration: An Ultimate Anthology Review by Cub Koda
This two-disc, 50-track set (including previously unreleased tracks, singles, album tracks and radio promo spots) is just about everything you'll ever need on this ultra-successful hit making machine of the '60s and early '70s. All their hits are here in pristine sound, as well as shelved album tracks from their first album and others showing a band that grew in creative leaps and bounds within the confines of the pop charts. It's a long way from "Hanky Panky" by the original band in 1963 (also included is the seldom anthologized B-side instrumental, the storming "Thunderbolt") to 1971's "Draggin' the Line," but James' success was largely based on his reinventing the band's sound to keep pace with the changing times, and it's all here to savor. Great notes from Jeff Tamarkin complete this excellent package.

Loss, death, and redemption: Anton Bruckner went through a whirlwind of emotions during the two years in which he wrote the Seventh Symphony. The worst theater fire in history left hundreds dead practically next door to his Vienna apartment; Bruckner would have been one of the victims, had he not decided at the last minute to stay at home instead of going to the opera. He still feared that the flames might engulf his apartment and his manuscripts. As he wrote shortly thereafter to a friend: "The inexpressible misery of so many souls makes the blood run cold!" In the Seventh Symphony, Bruckner incorporated all those unsettling impressions, as well as the mourning over the death of Richard Wagner, his admired "ideal."

To mark the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, the Palazzetto Bru Zane offers a chance to discover one of his most performed and admired operas in his lifetime, presented here in a rare version. Completed in 1893 and premiered the same year at the Opéra-Comique, the piece amusingly recounts the love affair between Nicias and Phryné, who dupes the old archon Dicephilus in order to avenge his cruelty. Its witty melodies and delightful orchestration made the opera an immediate success in Paris and then throughout France. It was enriched with recitatives composed by André Messager in 1896 to promote its career in theatres abroad. Hervé Niquet’s dashing interpretation brings out to the full the qualities of the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Rouen Normandie and the Chœur du Concert Spirituel, thus providing a sparkling backdrop for the virtuosic soprano voice of Florie Valiquette, the refined lyricism of the tenor Cyrille Dubois and the vocal authority of Thomas Dolié’s baritone.

This album explores the experience of foreigners in France. I see myself as belonging to a long genealogy of American artists who moved to Paris to escape the USA, a country that does not support its creators. Unlike my illustrious predecessors, I arrived in France during a pandemic that paralyzed the Parisian artistic scene. Paradoxically, the cancellation of live performances made it easier for me to collaborate with Parisian musicians and focus on composing. Rooted in the values and approaches of jazz, this album offers a musical view of Paris in the Covid-19 era. The ensemble’s direction, concept, and instrumentation is electronic and contemporary, using musical languages outside of the jazz tradition. Notably it mobilizes concepts from South Indian Carnatic music and North Africa. If French jazz musicians tend to mystify the New York and American music scene, having made the reverse journey, my music celebrates the mixing of culture that makes Paris a musical center.

This recording provides an opportunity to discover a forgotten Baroque operatic treasure, a zarzuela, the key dramatic and musical genre of the Spanish Golden Age. Sumptuous choruses, poignant arias and folksongs blend in a rich and spectacular narrative, whose music was falsely attributed to Antonio Literes before Sebastián Durón (1660-1716) was acknowledged as its composer in 2009! Another peculiarity of the work is that it is sung by seven sopranos, who are even given the roles of Apollo, Neptune and the monster Triton. Only the part of an old man, the seer Proteus, is assigned to a tenor. Ana Quintans in the title role, Isabelle Druet, Anthea Pichanick, Caroline Meng and Cyril Auvity are among the cast of this colourful zarzuela, whose modern stage premiere in 2019 enjoyed great success.

Founded by recorder player Olwen Foulkes, Ensemble Augelletti explores the chamber music and concertos that were performed on London theatre stages in the first decades of the 18thcentury. The name Augelletti means ‘little birds’ and references the aria ‘Augelletti che cantate’ that comes from the first act of Handel’s opera Rinaldo. The ensemble have performed on BBC Radio 3 ‘In Tune’ and ‘Early Music’ shows, in several UK Arts Festivals; London, Brighton, and York Early Music Festivals, and were winners of the FBAS young artist competition in Italy in 2019. Our debut CD of trio sonatas entitled ‘The library of a Prussian Princess’ will be released on Barn Cottage Records in February 2022.

Jil Caplan is a French pop singer whose peak success came in the early '90s in collaboration with hitmaker Jay Alanski. Born Jil Valentine on October 20, 1965, she initially became acquainted with Alanski during the mid-'80s when he collaborated with her friends in the band Les Innocents on their 1987 Top 40 hit single "Jodie." Alanski found Caplan promising and chose to collaborate with her on A Peine 21 (1987), her full-length album debut. Written and produced almost entirely by Alanski, A Peine 21 was a modest success for the previously unknown singer and spawned her first Top 40 hit single, "Oh! Tous les Soirs."

"Thieves & Yesterdays" is a collection of songs that put a contemporary spin on soulful roots music. The bands first full length studio album and Dan's 3rd in the past 5 years. The Delta Struts are driven by the dynamic guitar playing duo of Dan Bubien and Shawn Mazzei, along with Bubien’s soulful gritty vocals. Their signature sound is highlighted by the precision playing and deep toned-full sound of drummer Mark Pollera and glued together by Christian Caputo’s steady, groove oriented bass playing. Rooted in soul versed in styles from blues to funk, roots-rock to reggae, alt-country to singer/songwriter, Dan and the "Delta Struts" are constantly refining and redefining their craft with a wide palette of tones and textures, sounds and styles, to express their songwriting through an open, honest and wide catalogue of real songs. The album was recorded and mixed over a year long process in Youngstown, OH at Amperon Recorder by Pete Drivere and mastered at Cauliflower Audio by Adam Boose.

Only in relatively recent times the figure of Ferdinand Rebay (Vienna, June 11th, 1880 – Vienna, November 6th, 1953) began to resurface from the oblivion in which it had remained for more than half a century. He was born in a very musical family: his father owned a music shop and his mother, a pianist, had studied with no less a musician than Anton Bruckner. Consequently, he received an excellent musical education: once he had learned to play the violin and the piano, he was admitted as a chorister in the Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, and, later, his cultural interests widened to include the study of visual arts (he obtained a specialist degree at the School of the Austrian Museum in Vienna). However, professional studies in the field of music remained at the core of his interests: in fact, he learnt to play the horn too and he started composing Lieder, choral and operatic music. In 1901 he entered the Conservatory of Vienna in the class of J. Hofmann, and, most importantly, in the class of composition led by the eminent pedagogue Robert Fuchs. Rebay’s work for symphonic orchestra, Erlkönig, which he presented for the completion of his studies in 1904, led Fuchs to affirm that in his twenty-nine years as a Conservatory teacher he had never seen a better work than that. This was not all: by that time, Rebay had already written about a hundred pieces in all the various genres. Strengthened by such an intense preparation, he was appointed at first to the direction of the Wiener Chorverein, and later of the Wiener Schubertbund. In 1920 he obtained the Chair of Piano at the Musikakademie; at the same time, he successfully continued his compositional activity, particularly in the field of vocal music. He wrote about a hundred choral works, at least four hundred Lieder and two operas. When the Nazis came to power in 1938, with the tragic Hitlerian Anschluss, Rebay fell into disgrace. He was removed from his prestigious office and even his pension was withdrawn. He died in 1953 in Vienna, in poverty and entirely forgotten.

The US band is finally presenting an official release of their famed and reverently discussed Portal tapes! After splitting up, Cynic members Paul Masvidal, Sean Reinert and Jason Gobel formed the short-lived project Portal together with Chris Kringel on bass and stunning vocalist Aruna Abrams. Aruna’s beautiful and haunting voice combined with Paul’s clean vocals is the perfect fit for these laid back and subtle songs that have more in common with the sound of Porcupine Tree and The Gathering than their original Progressive Death Metal roots. This genre was shaped by Cynic’s full-length debut “Focus” (1993). Yet since their reunion in 2006, Cynic have moved via the Progressive Metal of their highly acclaimed second album “Traced in Air” (2008) towards ever more open soundscapes combining many stylistic influences. With “The Portal Tapes” the missing link in Cynic’s evolution is now available.

Think of Canadian rock bands and Rush probably spring to mind, as would Steppenwolf and Triumph. All fantastic bands. That's not to take anything away from April Wine, who in terms of output (if not success), must rank alongside the aforementioned. Classic hard rock that is really worth checking out….

This is the 2nd album by the undeniable present-day diva of Polish Jazz, vocalist Aga Zaryan. Recorded almost five years after the debut album, which is an agonizingly long break especially in the initial stage of her career, the album is both a conceptual continuation of the debut and a giant step in her artistic development. The eleven tracks are again predominantly standards with just two originals: one by guitarist Larry Koonse with lyrics by Zaryan and the other by bassist Darek Oleszkiewicz. Koonse and Oleszkiewicz are the main accompanying musicians with percussionist Munyungo Jackson and cornet player Nolan Shaheed contributing on some tracks…