Created for legendary ballerina Marcia Haydée, one of the great dance actresses of her generation, John Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias is a full-length ballet masterpiece. Like the Garbo film Camille and Verdi's La Traviata, it is based on Dumas's autobiographical novel about how, at the age of 20, he fell in love with a beautiful but doomed demi-mondaine. This stunning 1987 film is "a stroke of good fortune for the cinema and a triumph for Neumeier's ballet".

The sound of Rock Candy Funk Party is as celebratory as the band name suggests. Spinning a fresh take on classic ’70s and ’80s funk and jazz, RCFP is powered by a lineup of world-class players collaborating for the sheer joy of making music, and a mutual love of genre-blurring grooves. A jazz-funk fusion revival supergroup, Rock Candy Funk Party grew out of an instrumental album recorded by drummer and producer Tal Bergman and guitarist Ron DeJesus in 2007 called Grooove, Vol. 1.

Signature is a typically engaging release from Charlie Musselwhite. The harpist runs through a set of modern blues, complete with jazz and funk overtones – indeed, there are two straight jazz instrumentals, "Catwalk" and "What's New?," which showcase his astonishing technique. Not only is Musselwhite in fine form, his band is tight, soulful, and sympathetic, making Signature a worthwhile listen for most blues fans.

Thanks in part to Robert Palmer's hand in the process of compiling Addictions, Vol. 1, this early best-of is a fine peek into the musical passions that made Palmer tick. The 13 songs that make up the collection are mostly first-rate, and at the very least they present to a newcomer the eclecticism and style that made Palmer so consistently interesting. Since its genesis was 1989, the highlighted albums are Palmer's Island releases from 1978 to 1988: Double Fun, Secrets, Clues, Maybe It's Live, Pride, Riptide, Heavy Nova, and the soundtrack to Sweet Lies. Appropriately, the thundering, menacing "Some Like It Hot" from the Power Station's debut is included, though it's somewhat of a mystery as to why the band's T. Rex cover, "Get It On (Bang a Gong)," doesn't make an appearance. Only that song and "I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" seem like obvious omissions. The latter would appear on the remix-heavy Addictions, Vol. 2, but the former wouldn't appear on a career sampler until 1997's The Very Best of Robert Palmer. Otherwise, the collection is nearly perfect.

Talk to any connoisseur of '70s-era double live albums, and many will agree that Steve Hillage's Live Herald, recorded and released in 1977-1978, rates among the finest jewels that the genre has to offer. So it's astonishing to discover that someone has spent the last 25 years sitting on tapes that knock that set into the dust, both in terms of on-stage excitement and aural enjoyment. Live at Deeply Vale Festival '78 transports the listener back to one of the last truly great festivals staged in the U.K. that decade, a weekend's worth of music that fearlessly ranged across both the traditional rock range and the upcoming punk movement, before climaxing with a Hillage set that the guitarist himself reflects, "[sounds] as exciting now as Live Herald was back then."

El Loco is the seventh studio album by the American rock band ZZ Top, released in 1981. The title means "The Crazy One" in Spanish. The band's guitarist/singer Billy Gibbons has said that the recording of this album was the first time the three members of the band were isolated from one another in the studio, rather than recording simultaneously in the same room. It also foreshadowed ZZ Top's synthesizer-driven direction later in the decade, with early experimentations in synthesizer backing on certain tracks.

Paice Ashton Lord's sole album is a rather anonymous-sounding late-1970s hard rock/AOR effort. There's more funk, soul, boogie, and jazz influence than you would expect from Deep Purple alumni, but at heart these are typical period mainstream rock songs that don't lend a distinctive personality to the short-lived band. There's an outrageously blatant quote from Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel" in "Silas & Jerome." The 2001 CD reissue on Purple Records adds eight bonus tracks from the sessions for their unreleased second album, which are of a similar but less polished quality. Some of the songs are instrumentals rather than fully worked-up compositions, and the fidelity on a few of them is substandard, though not truly bad. The liner notes for the reissue give a thorough history of the band.

The current popularity of Bach's six cello suites can be traced back to the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who was the first to include these pieces in the concert repertoire. The young violinist Jorge Jimenez, also Catalan, is a great admirer of the great cellist, coming only a few kilometres from Casals' birthplace. But Bach's cello suites already attracted attention in the 19th century, in the course of the Leipzig Bach Renaissance around Felix Mendelssohn. The violin virtuoso and teacher Ferdinand David made an arrangement for the violin. Jorge Jimenez uses this edition from 1866 for his interpretation. It contains unusually varied and for that time very precise indications for the performance of the music. For this version, entirely in the 19th century reading, Jorge Jimenez uses a romantic violin and a bow from the period. His extraordinary interpretation of Bach's cello suites is the second part of his series "Rethinking Bach", which Jimenez began with his own highly acclaimed arrangement of the Goldberg Variations for solo violin (PC 10434).