Bluegrass? Jazz? Ambient? With piano and Weissenborn guitar, Lien and Hem create music for inner wanderings.

This is, like the others in the series, deserves the warmest possible recommendation.

During his lifetime Odysseus was one of Bruch’s most frequently performed and highly regarded works: the influential English critic J. A. Fuller-Maitland thought it his masterpiece, and Brahms admired it greatly. It was a very successful performance of Odysseus in Liverpool in 1877 that led three years later to Bruch’s appointment as Director of the Philharmonic Society there. It is an oratorio, not an opera (subtitled Scenes from the Odyssey), and one reason for its decline into obscurity may be that for such a subject it is often undramatic, in word-setting (sometimes rather square and inexpressive) and in its choice of episodes: Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, and the jubilation over his rout of the suitors are portrayed, but not Penelope’s recognition of him nor the fight itself. There is no narrator, and there are very few dramatic links between the 12 self-contained sections.

Mud's debut album is one of those records that truly sums up a time and a place – in this instance, England in 1974, as glam rock flirted increasingly gregariously with a similarly ongoing rock & roll revival. It was a period, after all, in which Bill Haley returned to the Top 20, Showaddywaddy was threatening to dominate it, and Mud itself had been launching some remarkably convincing Elvis impersonations into the upper echelons of the chart. Mud's producers and songwriters, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, certainly encouraged their charges' retro pretensions, conceiving both Mud Rock and its successor, Mud Rock, Vol. 2, as all-out party albums, with the band the greatest jukebox in the land.

Although several other hard rock acts have seen their hits repackaged more times than Kiss (namely the Who, Motörhead, Black Sabbath, etc.), the masked quartet certainly isn't far behind, as 2002 saw the group's latest in a long line of collections, The Very Best of Kiss. Despite recycling many of the same selections over and over on these sets (1978's Double Platinum, 1988's Smashes, Thrashes & Hits, 1997's Greatest Kiss, etc.), fans will flock to the stores to buy any piece of Kiss merchandise to complete their collections, hence the arrival of another of hits.

METAL ALLEGIANCE principal partner Mark Menghi, the project’s original material came together from the creative minds of David Ellefson of MEGADETH, Mike Portnoy of THE WINERY DOGS,and Alex Skolnick from TESTAMENT, alongside Menghi. The four writers then reached out through their metal phone books to a diverse lineup of performers, each adding their own personal musical stamp to the collection of nine original songs.

Many albums have scaled to the top of the American charts, many of them not so good, but few have been as widely forgotten and spurned as REO Speedwagon's Hi Infidelity. In a way, the group deserved this kind of success. They had been slogging it out in the arenas of the U.S., building up a sizeable audience because they could deliver live. And then, in 1980, they delivered a record that not just summarized their strengths, but captured everything that was good about arena rock. This is the sound of the stadiums in that netherworld between giants like Zeppelin and MTV's slick, video-ready anthems. This is unabashedly mainstream rock, but there's a real urgency to the songs and the performances that gives it a real emotional core, even if the production keeps it tied to the early, previsual '80s.

"Suspicious Heart", VAN STEPHENSON's second album for MCA Records and his last as solo artist, is a must have in your collection too. Despite of being recorded with almost the same personnel from the previous, including Dann Huff / Alan Pasqua and Richard Landis producing, the album - released in 1986 - has a pretty different sound.

Big Girl is the third album by Dutch alto saxophonist Candy Dulfer. Prior to its release, she had been working mainly with Ulco Bed. She was impressed, however, with Thomas Bank, an up-and-coming producer and keyboard player. This work marks the transition between the two producers and as a result has a much more funky style and tries to incorporate elements of rap and hip hop into contemporary jazz. The album features a collaboration with Trijntje Oosterhuis, on the track "Funkyness", before Trijntje became widely known as a singer. The album is mainly instrumental. According to her official biography, the title of the album was an inside joke, referring to her father Hans Dulfer's album Big Boy and indicating that she had grown up and was in charge of her own career. The album peaked at #28 in the Dutch album chart.

The Symphony in C was conceived in Paris in the late 1930s, but completed in America in 1940, and is dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premièred in 1946, the Symphony in Three Movements presents us with movements that also manifest different ways of moving: a march, a slow dance, and a march-jog-race.