John Martyn's follow-up to 1973's Inside Out is a much more song-oriented, less experimental effort which concentrates on the joys of home and family. Sunday's Child skillfully blends the sensual ("You Can Discover") with the sweet ("My Baby Girl"), the modern ("Root Love") with the traditional ("Spencer the Rover"), and the tormented ("Sunday's Child") with the satisfied ("Satisfied Mind," "Call Me Crazy") while retaining its cohesiveness. The record, his sixth on his own, shows the many facets of Martyn's playing, from his effects-driven electric guitar to his signature acoustic work, which can be both aggressive ("The Message") and gentle ("Lay It All Down"). This album contains a collection of strong original songs, as well as a pair of wonderful covers: the traditional British ballad "Spencer the Rover" and the country standard "Satisfied Mind." His last recording of new material for three years, Sunday's Child is a fine farewell to this period of Martyn's ever-changing career.

Conservative in his musical style as in his politics – rightly or wrongly the whiff of Fascism hangs over his name – Ottorino Respighi is remembered today almost exclusively for the blazing triptych of Roman tone poems. He also, however, produced a corpus of chamber, keyboard and vocal works, not to mention operas and orchestral pieces, many of which are crying out to be rediscovered. Slowly they are finding their way into concert programmes and on to record, and this disc from the Ambache should bring three of them a well-deserved wider currency. The superb Piano Quintet in F minor occasionally recalls Franck (who wrote one in the same key), but its piano-dominated lyrical effusion is wholly individual. The substantial ten-minute first movement is inadequately balanced by a two-minute Andantino and four-minute scherzo-like Vivacissimo, however, and it is possible that a finale has somehow become detached.

Wolfgang Wagner’s arrestingly beautiful production, filmed live at Bayreuth in 1981 and directed by Brian Large, features a stellar cast led by Eva Randova, Bernd Weikl and Siegfried Jerusalem. “A production and performance that showed the festival at its finest… Wolfgang Wagner’s Bayreuth production of his grandfather’s “farewell to the world” has “an unusual beauty and logic of its own… There is an air of magic and mystery about the staging… The performance was excellent… Horst Stein [conducted] a beautifully proportioned Parsifal.” (The New York Times)

Thriller 40 is the 40th anniversary edition reissue of American singer Michael Jackson's sixth studio album Thriller (1982). The original album has sold 70 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album of all time. Thriller 40 was released on November 18, 2022, cooperation with Epic, Legacy Recordings and MJJ Productions. It is his first posthumous album in five years since the release of 2017's Scream. Thriller 40 marks the third reissue of the original record, following the 2001 special edition and Thriller 25 (2008).

Since his emergence onto the New York scene in 1959, pianist Harold Mabern has become one of the few true living jazz stylists on the piano. Having played with everyone from Lionel Hampton to Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, and Lee Morgan, Mabern has the experience and the depth of knowledge sufficient to be called a master. There is no one on the scene who sounds like him, and his sense of lyricism, rhythm, time, and the entire range of dynamics in his playing attract other players as well as listeners. The Leading Man, issued in 1993, is considered a classic, both for its selection of material and the performances of the various ensembles Mabern assembled for the date. But there is something else, too – nowhere in Mabern's recorded catalog is there a performance like this from him.

"Mon plus beau Noël" has been recorded with the prestigious Prague Symphonic Ensemble and the children's choir of the Maîtrise Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens de Bulle. It features timeless French Christmas melodies – such as “Douce Nuit”, “Les Anges dans nos Campagnes”, and “Mon Beau Sapin” – rearranged and re-orchestrated in exceptional symphonic versions. The composers and arrangers Martin Batchelar, Samuel Pegg, Jérôme Kuhn, and Nathan Stornetta have given these marvellous works new depth and emotion.

Louise de Penancoët de Keroualle (Lady Louise), a spy in the pay of Louis XIV, was the mistress of Charles II. Charged with keeping England under the influence of the Sun King, she forged close links between musicians on either side of the Channel. These political intentions generated a repertory as rich and brilliant as it was expressive. It is a genuine rediscovery that we owe to Ensemble Leviathan and Lucile Tessier.

Chelleri is far older than any other symphonist in our series. In his corpus, the symphony (as understood in a modern sense) is the accomplishment of a long path of research and transformation of style. When Chelleri did deal with “modern symphonies”, counting himself among the proponents of the new instrumental music, after having written mainly harpsichord suites as well as old-style symphonies, he no longer resided in the Duchy of Parma, where he was born, but in northern Europe, in Germany and in Sweden. Chelleri was a great imitator, and these “Six new symphonies” are clearly six stylistic studies on the new trends in vogue in Europe in the 1730s and 1740s.

This program with works for baroque violin reveals Bach as the unique composer he was but also as an accomplished and fastidious craftsman, with an acute sense of effective color and an ability to blend stylistically divergent features into a fluent and satisfying whole. The performances by Boris Begelman are characteristically energetic and stylish. The works are played on a violin by Louis Moitessier from the 1790s. Boris Begelman is the concert master of the recently founded orchestra Amici Veneziani. This group was founded by soprano Simone Kermes and combines the best musicians she has worked with during the last five years.