Lisa Wahlandt has been enchanting her enthusiastic audience for many years. With her fascinating voice, she stages jazz and pop classics, German-language songs or German-language songs or even exciting original compositions into a personal, almost private chamber play. Whether Bavarian or Portuguese, whether Bossa Nova, world music or Jazz - with Lisa Wahlandt and her band, all of this blends as if it were a matter of course to a musical feel-good experience.

Welcome to the bewitching world of Circus Dinogad in which Welsh contralto Hilary Summers, the Dutch theorbo & bass clarinet duo Mike Fentross & Maarten Ornstein and the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam converge in a fusion of musical traditions.

"In conversations about Franz Schmidt the recurring theme emerging for many is that listening to a performance of his music at a young age became the turning point in their lives –the realization of how powerful music can be," says Jonathan Berman, whose longtime love of Franz Schmidt's work has its origins in a performance preparation for his Fourth Symphony.

Mozart’s string quintets represent "some of his most sophisticated musical thinking … wonderful music, exhilarating to hear” (from the liner notes by Eric Bromberger). With this three album set, the Alexander String Quartet and Paul Yarbrough complete their Mozart compendium.

This is, without a doubt, one of the best albums in the Spanish progressive of all times. Gotic is a wonderful example of the adaptation of foreign musical tendencies (basically Anglo-Saxon and Italian progressive, Canterbury and fusion) to the personal and local music of Catalonia. The group, located in Barcelona, was born in 1977, and was formed by Rafael Escoté (bass, gong and palms), Jordi Martí (drums, percussion, palms), Jep Nuix (flute, piccolo, palms) and Jordi Vilaprinyo (piano, harpsichord, mini moog, violin, hammond, palms), with sporadic interventions from Jordi Codina and Josep Albert Cubero at guitars. They only released this masterpiece before their separation, but this is more than enough to place them in the top of the progressive style.

With the cover art for Paper Gods, Duran Duran cheekily revisit icons of their past: the smile of Rio, the cap of the "Chauffeur," girls on film, and a prowling tiger. Thirty years in, Duran Duran are comfortable enough to play with their past, comfortable enough to draw an explicit connection to their back pages by hiring Nile Rodgers - who helmed Notorious back in the day - to do a bit of production alongside Mark Ronson, the hitmaker who gave the group a refurbishment on 2010's All You Need Is Now. Most of the record, however, bears credits either by Mr. Hudson or Josh Blair, two younger musicians who help give Paper Gods a bit of a contemporary glint. While there are nods at the '80s and even the '90s arriving in the form of samples, synthesizers, and power ballads, Paper Gods is an aggressively modern album, living in the oversaturated world where emojis and gifs battle in perpetual motion…

With that of Orpheus, the myth of Dido has no doubt been one of the most prolific in epics, drama and, as from the 17th century, in musical theatre. Teodor Currentzis, a young rising star on the international scene (let's just mention his success in 2008 at Opéra Bastille), took hold of this musical monument to offer us a version where, for once, drama prevails.

Nel vastissimo catalogo delle opere di Antonio Vivaldi (circa 1.000 numeri considerando le appendici), la musica da camera rappresenta una parte non considerevole e, probabilmente, una delle meno note rispetto alla frequentatissima produzione concertistica e sacra, a cui si è agggiunta, negli ultimi anni, quella operistica. Per quest'ultima si pensi, ad esempio, alle recenti produzioni dell'etichetta "Naive" o alle arie d'opera riscoperte e magistralmente eseguite in forma di concerto da Cecilia Bartoli.

One of the great composing figures from the French Baroque, Michel-Richard de Lalande is starting to receive his just dues through modern recordings, and Glossa is happy to unveil a new release featuring Olivier Schneebeli directing Les Pages et Les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles in three of Lalande’s sumptuous grands motets. Very much a favoured composer during the reign of Louis XIV, Lalande progressively assumed – from the 1680s onwards – more and more of the principal court offices, and was called upon to provide sacred music for the Chapelle Royale within the Château de Versailles.

On their first two albums, Led Zeppelin unleashed a relentless barrage of heavy blues and rockabilly riffs, but Led Zeppelin III provided the band with the necessary room to grow musically. While there are still a handful of metallic rockers, III is built on a folky, acoustic foundation that gives the music extra depth. And even the rockers aren't as straightforward as before: the galloping "Immigrant Song" is powered by Robert Plant's banshee wail, "Celebration Day" turns blues-rock inside out with a warped slide guitar riff, and "Out on the Tiles" lumbers along with a tricky, multi-part riff. Nevertheless, the heart of the album lies on the second side, when the band delve deeply into English folk.

Like 2005's Rock of Ages: The Definitive Collection, 2018's The Story So Far: The Best of Def Leppard spans 35 songs spread over two discs. Since this is a basic hits collection, that means there is considerable overlap between the two compilations: a grand total of 20 tracks, with the remaining 15 largely dedicated to deep cuts, along with a new cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus." On the whole, The Story So Far doesn't necessarily best Rock of Ages, but it's not worse, either. The difference between the two compilations is on the margins, with the album cuts on both proving that Def Leppard delivered plenty of excellent music that wasn't always hits.