Famously tagged as "fascist" in a Rolling Stone review printed at the time of its 1978 release, Jazz does indeed showcase a band that does thrive upon its power, thrilling upon the hold that it has on its audience. That confidence, that self-intoxication, was hinted at on News of the World but it takes full flower here, and that assurance acts as a cohesive device, turning this into one of Queen's sleekest albums. Like its patchwork predecessor, Jazz also dabbles in a bunch of different sounds – that's a perennial problem with Queen, where the four songwriters were often pulling in different directions – but it sounds bigger, heavier than News, thanks to the mountains of guitars Brian May has layered all over this record. If May has indulged himself, Freddie Mercury runs riot all over this album, infusing it with an absurdity that's hard to resist.

Face Up is Lisa Stansfield's first offering for the new millennium, and on this disc she treads similar waters as on previous albums, except for a few more adventurous outings. The album's first single, "Let's Just Call It Love," incorporates the British garage 2step beats introduced to Americans and popularized earlier in 2001 by fellow Brit Craig David, and makes for an unusual but interesting leadoff single. The album's opener, "I've Got Something Better," is classic, funky Lisa Stansfield at her best, and the song gets more and more fun with each repeated listening. Other standouts include the Burt Bacharach-ish show-stopping ballad "How Could You?," the pleading "Don't Leave Now I'm in Love," and the set's most obvious hit, the breezy, disco-laced anthem "8-3-1."

From what we know about the life of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, he (like most professional musicians past and present) kept busy by playing, creating, teaching and running a music shop—in other words, living a life that looks either desperately chaotic or organically multi-faceted, depending on your point of view. Born in Andelot in 1667, a river town in northeast France, he joined the choir school of Langres Cathedral, about 30 miles away, at the age of nine. By the time Montéclair arrived in Paris in 1687 (the year of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s death), French culture had undergone a radical transformation by way of the visionary patronage of Louis XIV.

Bereits das erste Album von Reinhard Goebels Aufnahmeprojekt "Beethovens Welt" mit Violinkonzerten von Franz Clement (1780-1842) erhielt große Beachtung und exzellente Rezensionen weltweit. Die Welt am Sonntag widmete dem Komponisten sogar zwei Seiten als herausragende Entdeckung und urteilte abschließend: "Wenn die Entdeckung Beethoven-Zeitgenossen, die sich gerade Goebel fürs Beethoven-Jahr auf die Fahnen geschrieben hat, so weitergeht, wird es ein feines Jahr." Auch SWR2 lobte das Projekt: "Reinhard Goebel verspricht nach diesen beiden Violinkonzerten von Clement noch weitere spannende Erkundungen aus Beethovens Welt."

Ukrainian composer-pianist Lubomyr Melnyk (*1948) composes piano pieces whose sound waves are in a constant state of flux and generate fascinating momentum. This language, which he calls “Continuous Music”, is his own invention, combining and blending influences from American minimal music with late-romantic harmonies and melodies. On the 'Sony Classical' label, "ILLIRION" features five works that he has composed and recorded himself. They display the beauty, magic and complexity of “continuous music” in all its many facets. The works are between four and 16 minutes long, and the notes, sometimes played with uncanny velocity, blur to create an unbroken stream of sound, often inducing trance-like states and ineluctably holding listeners spellbound.

As a venue, the Royal Albert Hall in London is the stuff of legend. It is so elegant it inspires greatness in performers no matter the discipline, as well as rapt and supportive attentiveness in audiences. Some of its past performers have included Frank Sinatra, a double bill by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. It therefore goes without saying that the weight on Cinematic Orchestra mastermind Jason Swinscoe to pull off something grand for a recording and video document of this CO performance was considerable. In order to accomplish this feat, he swelled the ranks of his group to over 40 members, including the entire 24-piece Heritage Orchestra! Vocalists Heidi Vogel, Lou Rhodes, and Grey Reverend are all present to reprise their roles from various selections on studio recordings. Original Cinematic Orchestra turntablist PC returned to the fold for the evening as well…

Weather Report's biggest-selling album is that ideal thing, a popular and artistic success – and for the same reasons. For one thing, Joe Zawinul revealed an unexpectedly potent commercial streak for the first time since his Cannonball Adderley days, contributing what has become a perennial hit, "Birdland." Indeed, "Birdland" is a remarkable bit of record-making, a unified, ever-developing piece of music that evokes, without in any way imitating, a joyous evening on 52nd St. with a big band. The other factor is the full emergence of Jaco Pastorius as a co-leader; his dancing, staccato bass lifting itself out of the bass range as a third melodic voice, completely dominating his own ingenious "Teen Town" (where he also plays drums!).

Mozart wrote a plethera of fine chamber music in the galante style of the classical era: Quintets for various instruments, string quartets, string trios, string duos, piano trios, violin sonatas and the two magnificent piano quartets here. With these two quartets, Mozart more-or-less invented the genre which was later taken up by Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak. These piano quartets show Mozart in both a dramatic mode in the minor work and a typical merry mood in the major piece.

Jordi Savall is strongly devoted, perhaps more so than any other conductor, to Franz Josef Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross in its orchestral version, the original incarnation of this masterwork; the familiar string quartet and less familiar solo keyboard and oratorio versions came later. Savall, as is his wont, strongly responds to any music with a historic connection to his native Spain; the commission for the Seven Last Words arrived from José Sáenz de Santmaría of the confraternity of the Hermandad, and it was first performed in Cádiz, the oldest continuously inhabited city in Western Europe.