The entries in Sony Legacy Playlist series may be packaged as budget compilations, but they really do represent the best-known and most representative tracks by a given artist during their tenure with the company. Former Frank Zappa sideman and guitar virtuoso Steve Vai's volume is no exception to the standard. Included here are 12 studio and two live cuts from his long tenure with Sony and Epic. The cuts are arranged aesthetically rather than chronologically, making for a very solid mix. This one kicks off with “Erotic Nightmares” from his third album for the label, Passion and Warfare. Also included here are “Lotus Feet,” “Salamanders in the Sun,” “Love Secrets,” and fine live versions of “You’re Here,” and “Whispering a Prayer.” In addition to these 14 cuts, there is also bonus CD-R material to boot. While fans may have everything here already, this set serves as an excellent, modestly priced introduction to Vai’s solo work.

Suzi Quatro's fifth album took its title from one of her earliest U.K. press interviews, a mouth-agape appraisal of the leather-clad vixen whose headline, "If you knew Suzi…like the tattooist knew Suzi," seemed to sum up every ounce of the image that the glam scene's most glamorous newcomer exuded. Five years later, however, the second half of that statement wasn't simply forgotten, it was all but meaningless to the majority of her audience, so thoroughly had she reinvented herself. Gone was the leather, gone were the guts, gone was the violent threat that Quatro once posed to passing manhood, to be replaced – as the album's cover made clear – by a demure, cord-clad lass in a pastel blouse and a look of such winsome vulnerability that, when she sang "Don't Change My Luck," it was enough to break your heart.

Hey Stoopid is the 19th studio album by rock singer Alice Cooper, released on July 2, 1991. After his smash 1989 hit album Trash, Cooper attempted to continue his success with his follow-up album, which features guest performances from Slash, Ozzy Osbourne, Vinnie Moore, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars (both of Mötley Crüe). Hey Stoopid was the last music album to feature bassist Hugh McDonald before he joined Bon Jovi as their unofficial bassist in 1995. According to Cooper assistant Brian Renfield, an alternate cover was originally considered, described by Renfield as being "hardcore with hypo needles, pills…" Notably, the track "Feed My Frankenstein" features famed guitar duo Steve Vai and Joe Satriani playing together, accompanied by Nikki Sixx on Bass. In 2014, "Dangerous Tonight" was featured in the video game Watch_Dogs.

Stern’s well known strengths in Brahms, as evidenced in his studio recordings, are reprised here. He plays with a communicative classicism that embraces romanticised rubati - which elongates but never breaks the line - and which vests the music sometimes with a heartbreaking sense of pathos…The orchestra remains rather bluff…But never mind, it’s Stern’s show and Wöss accompanies admirably.

Friedrich Lux (1820–95) was one of those musicians who formed the fabric of musical life in nineteenth-century Germany: though he worked away from the major cities, as conductor, teacher, organist, organiser and composer, he was an indispensable element of the communities in which he worked. His large body of organ music, as good as unknown before now, brings together elements of the musical language of Bach, Mendelssohn and Schumann, in works that range from the intimate to the grandiose.This second volume brings some of his many transcriptions to the fore.

A 17th Century manuscript that was compiled but Albert Bobowski, a Polish musician and orientalist, contains songs of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman court. Bobowski, alias Ali Ufki, was born around 1610 in Poland and worked in Constantinople at the Ottoman court where he was involved with many diplomats,clerics and travellers as translator, language teacher, mediator and adviser. Thanks to his diverse skills and profound knowledge of the Islamic-Ottoman and Christian-European cultures, he became a valued mediator between the two worlds during his lifetime. In this collection of European and Ottoman vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, court and popular music, Ali Ufki switches between languages and music genres with a fantastic ease and naturalness.

Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor is a radiant synthesis of the composer’s early and later periods. Poorly received at the time, its lyricism and colour are pervasive and it has duly taken its place in the repertoire, not least because of its warm-hearted voluptuousness, rhythmic vitality and inventive structure. Written in 1891, a single movement is all that exists of the Symphony in D minor ‘Youth’, while The Rock is an early example of Rachmaninov’s powers of descriptive intensity. These acclaimed VOX recordings conducted by Leonard Slatkin were originally issued in 1979 and 1982.

The premiere of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 in D minor was a notorious failure. It took until the 1940s for the work to gain recognition, and it contains much that is recognisable from the composer’s later works – brooding intensity, lyricism and yearning, orchestral colour and grandeur, written in a profoundly Russian manner. Unperformed during his lifetime, Prince Rostislav exudes Rachmaninov’s familiar qualities of melancholy and voluptuousness; and both works feature his pervasive use of the Dies irae theme. These acclaimed VOX recordings conducted by Leonard Slatkin were originally issued in 1977 and 1982.

Pianist François-Xavier Poizat, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Simone Menezes, gives us a taste of the influences of jazz, Mozart and Saint-Saëns featured in Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, one of his last finished works.