Two first recordings of concertos by a Scot (Mackenzie) who settled in England as Principal of the Royal Academy of Music and an Englishman (Tovey) who settled in Scotland as a Professor at Edinburgh University's Reid School of Music.
Mackenzie's Scottish Concerto, premiered by no less a man than Paderewski in 1897, is a colourful and entertaining work which uses several Scottish themes in a fundamentally Lisztian design.

This 22-cut double-disc set finally gets at it. Issuing a single disc of Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler would be a silly thing at best and a hopelessly frustrating one at worst. When the band burst on the scene with "Sultans of Swing," there was a lot happening in rock music, but most of it was under the radar and remains forgotten except in the historic annals of music fanatics. Knopfler and his band were full of rock & roll romance and proved it through their first four recordings time and again. They couldn't help but become superstars and mainstays of MTV. But there is another story told on this best-of, which begins with "Telegraph Road."

Miracle is billed as a collaboration between Celine Dion and Anne Geddes, a photographer who specializes in photos of babies, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the subtitle of the album is "A Celebration of New Life." After all, all of Geddes' work celebrates new life, and Dion has been very outspoken in how motherhood has changed her life, so it's only natural that their collaboration is about newborns. Since Geddes is strictly a photographer, "collaboration" may be a misleading title, but Miracle isn't strictly just a music album. Instead, it's a book accompanied with an album, with the images inspired by the songs and vice versa; in the special edition of the album, there's even a DVD of the making of the project, extending it into another realm of multimedia. As a piece of music, it's the quietest record Dion has recorded in a while, an unabashed adult contemporary album that keeps its gentle mood from start to finish, as if it were a prolonged lullaby.

This was Billie Holiday's penultimate album, recorded when her body was telling her enough was enough. During the sessions with arranger Ray Ellis she was drinking vodka neat, as if it were tap water. Despite her ravaged voice (the sweetness had long gone), she was still an incredible singer. The feeling and tension she manages to put into almost every track set this album as one of her finest achievements. "You've Changed" and "I Get Along Without You Very Well" are high art performances from the singer who saw life from the bottom up.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold is best known for the scores to Captain Blood and other films he wrote in Hollywood after fleeing Nazism in the mid-1930s, but he was also a composer of concert music earlier (and later) in his career. This music was forgotten under the modernist regime but has been revived to great success. Korngold's chamber music, though, still qualifies as neglected, and this superb recording of the composer's Piano Quintet in E major, Op. 15 and String Quartet No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 26, plus a rediscovered string quartet version of his popular incidental music for Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, has been successful right out of the box.

Today, the music city of Salzburg basks in the fame of its most famous son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was born into a very music-friendly environment: Archbishop Sigismund III reigned from 1753 to 1771, who particularly promoted music and generously sponsored the travels of the young Mozart with his family - in contrast to his frugal successor Count Colloredo, who eventually abandoned Mozart Salzburg sold. In his childhood, however, his father Leopold and the young Michael Haydn were influential figures in Salzburg's musical life; two men who shared a problem: they were overshadowed by even more prominent relatives. Leopold in that of his son, Michael, who is known as a child prodigy, in that of his world-famous brother Joseph. Works by these two and the very young "Wolferl" show the playful, light elegance that prevailed in Salzburg during this period of early Classicism - especially in works involving the shepherd's horn, a Salzburg specialty that Henning Wiegräbe mastered with virtuosity.

The catalyst for this disc came with the chance discovery of a vocal score of Berkeley’s Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons. Not ever having heard of the piece, I saw the forces it is scored for and thought it fit rather well the remit of the LCS. A little research soon revealed that the piece had never been recorded, nor was there anything of a performance history either. I could tell there was a piece of real merit and substance here, and it most definitely deserved an outing. All this coincided with the arrival of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Planning live performances was impossible but working towards a recording further down the line seemed doable. January 2021 came and we – like so many others – had to cancel the planned recording. By January 2022, the project finally happened. I would like to add my personal thanks to the Lennox Berkeley Society, who have been so helpful and supportive since my very first email to them, not to mention patient as the pandemic forced recording plans to keep being postponed.

The world has changed a lot since 1992, when Don Breithaupt first collected an album's worth of his irresistibly hooky and jazzy pop songs and formed Monkey House. Since then, the talented and prolific Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, composer, arranger, and producer has stamped the band's Kurt Vonnegut-inspired moniker on five albums of original material, including Headquarters (2012), Left (2016) and Friday (2019), the latter a blazing tour de force which topped the iTunes jazz chart and went to #11 on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. Now, to mark their thirtieth anniversary, Monkey House presents their most accomplished and exciting set yet, Remember The Audio, on which Breithaupt is joined by his A-List wrecking crew of Mark Kelso on drums, Pat Kilbride on bass, Justin Abedin on guitar, and guests including trumpeters Randy Brecker, Guido Basso and Michael Leonhart, guitarist Drew Zingg, and singers Lucy Woodward and David Blamires. After years of fluid lineups, Breithaupt says he had an epiphany back in 2011 while rounding up the usual suspects to make Headquarters: Hey, wouldn't it be nice if this coalesced into a steady band?

Founded in 2010, Trio Gaspard has become one of the most sought-after piano trios of its generation, whose members are praised for their unique and fresh approach to the score. The Trio is regularly invited to perform at leading concert halls throughout the world. It has an impressive history of international festival appearances, and each member also continues to pursue a successful solo career.