For more than thirty years, the guitarist and songwriter from Bochum, Germany, has released new albums at regular intervals with his ARP band. Reactions from fans and media alike have been consistently positive while impressive record sales, high chart positions and ever-increasing audience numbers at his concerts and tours say it all. LOST XXIII is a very special album in Pell's longstanding career, extremely varied, consisting of ten deeply melodic hard rock songs (plus intro) in typical ARP style, as well as a number of fast-paced highlights and surprising compositions. Among the focal points is the title track with it's chorus featuring Arabic scales - as Pell explains "a longer, epic track that's pretty characteristic of me."

Anyone who has spent time listening to Canada-born, Austin-based guitar slinger Sue Foley knows "Pinky" is her signature paisley-print pink Fender Telecaster. Pinky's Blues is her second offering for Stony Plain. Foley and her band – bassist Jon Penner, drummer Chris Layton (of Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble fame), and Hammond B-3 organist, producer Mike Flanigin – got together with engineer Chris Bell over three days in a San Marcos, Texas studio and cut these 12 tracks live on the floor. Foley's focus is the Texas blues and the artists who embody them in a set of covers and originals. She captures the Lone Star blues styles with raw energy, passion, and stellar musicianship.

String quartet fans will relish this excellent release from ECM. Although the Shostakovich 8th is one of the most over-recorded pieces in the string quartet literature, the performance here is worth having, and is combined with a somewhat familiar but not as widely recorded piece by Webern (for those who might be afraid to listen to anything by Webern, let me assure you that this is a most lovely, lyrical, hauntingly beautiful work, not at all daunting) and a quartet by a composer that will be unfamiliar to most, Emil Burian (1904-1959), whose String Quartet No. 4 is a haunting piece that makes for an attractive finish for this fine CD by the Rosamunde Quartet. The sound quality is rich and radiant in the best ECM tradition.

After satisfying all of their classical music kinks with keyboard player Jon Lord's overblown Concerto for Group and Orchestra, Deep Purple's soon to be classic Mark II version made its proper debut and established the sonic blueprint that would immortalize this lineup of the band on 1970's awesome In Rock…

With Lux laetitiae , La Reverdie continues its discographical journey after the success of its most recent production devoted to Francesco Landini: from the Florence of the great blind composer of the fourteenth century, to the splendour of the Este court in fifteenth-century Ferrara! The programme presents twelve pieces from an important codex that belonged to the court, in which fashionable composers such as Guillaume Dufay and John Dunstaple tried their hand at the motet genre. The performances combine six voices with a rich array of instruments and aim to reproduce the resplendent sound of the Este cappella at the time of Lionello and Borso, passionate patrons who attracted to Ferrara many talented artists charged with adorning the court with art, beauty and harmony. An exploration of the prolific tradition of the Marian cult which, from the twelfth century onwards, was manifested in an extraordinary wealth of musical forms and which, in the fifteenth century, resulted in grandiose compositions that can still captivate us today with their complexity and fascination.

Johann Sebastian Bach was certainly familiar with the Pantaleon – a large hammered dulcimer with a wide range and full chromatic scale. Bach’s contemporary Pantaleon Hebenstreit had developed the instrument, through which he gained international renown and became one of the best-paid Dresden court musicians. The instrument enjoyed great popularity in the 18th century and was an important precursor of the fortepiano, its younger brother. Bach may have heard Hebenstreit with his Pantaleon himself, as he knew several court musicians of the Dresden orchestra personally and also performed with some of them. Whilst we cannot know if they had met in reality, our imagination has nonetheless been much exercised. What would Bach have put on his famous colleague's music stand? Very little music written for the Pantaleon has survived, although the instrument’s use in the court orchestras of Vienna and Dresden suggests that works for the harpsichord and for the violin in particular could have served for arrangements and improvisations. It is hard to imagine that Bach would have objected to a virtuoso like Hebenstreit adapting his violin sonatas for the Pantaleon.

Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals, published in 1603 after an eleven-year gestation, bears witness to the metamorphosis of the madrigal and the rapid evolution of music at the turn of the two centuries. It is also a model of the genre and may be regarded as one of the most innovative and emblematic of its composer’s style.

A significant name of the German krautrock scene, Thirsty Moon were found in Bremen in 1972 and started as a 7-member band. By the same year their eponymous debut was already recorded and released by Brain Records. It consists of four short tracks and one epic jam,clocking at over 20 minutes (+ bonus track on this CD edition). The album follows the typical German mode of krautrock with strong interplays, long jamming and a lot of space for endless improvisational musicianship. Saxes are everywhere played by Willie Pape and ranging from smooth passages to abstract heavy parts. There is also some lovely percussion work throughout the listening, featuring also nice organ and groovy electric pianos. Vocals are English with a rough edge, which fit very much to the band's style, while the epic of the album contains also a lot of spacey parts…

Following an exceptional critical reception of their first volume of Mendelssohn Quartets, the Doric String Quartet now completes the project. As in the case of the previous volume, the players juxtapose one of the early quartets (No. 2) with two of the later compositions (Nos 3 and 4), composed a decade or so later. Composed in 1827, the Second Quartet pays homage to Beethoven’s outstanding contribution to the genre (Beethoven died in March of that year), but this is no simple pastiche. It is a confident work, Mendelssohn’s individual voice already clearly present. The later quartets are perhaps less overtly revolutionary – Mendelssohn was now an established figure and a recipient of Royal commissions – but nevertheless remain clear milestones in the development of the genre.