A joyous return and everything you couldwant from MGMT. A very "MGMT MGMT album" which the band describes as "a group of songs about love and change, first and foremost." Descriptors from the band include: bold, flavorful, playful, sincere, optimistic, perceptive. Loss Of Life was produced by MGMT and Patrick Wimberly (Solange, Lil Yachty, MGMT), with mixing and additional production by Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Interpol, Spoon).

With Book 3, The Chronicles of Father Robin reach the final chapter of “The Songs & Tales of Airoea”. This dynamic and soulful journey starts with the upbeat “Magical Chronicle”, a vocal driven track full of lush harmonies and clear references to prog classics such as Gentle Giant, Yezda Urfa and the Canterbury Scene. From the atmospheric “Skyslumber” and the soaring prog ballad that Yes never wrote, “Cloudship”, the album burst into the dynamic psych-rocker “Empress of the Sun”, a song full of energy and contrast eventually sliding into a keyboard lead middle part reminiscent of The Doors at their most adventurous. Finishing the album “Lost in the Palace Gardens” starts off with a beautiful acoustic guitar part brining associations to British folk bands such as Steeleye Span, but also the guitar work of a certain Jimmy Page. The track follows up with vocal parts where Andreas Prestmo and Aleksandra Morozova’s voices perfectly complement each other, making it a perfect culmination of this highly ambitious body of work where Father Robin explores the cloud lands in the Sky.

“Nobody plays this music more authoritatively and eloquently,” wrote London’s Sunday Times of Stephen Kovacevich in Beethoven. “He is in his element, responding wholeheartedly to the extreme physicality that Beethoven brought to music … but the wit and delicacy of the playing are also remarkable.”Kovacevich himself has spoken of his love for the “fun and virtuosity” of the composer’s early sonatas, while in the often challenging later works he sees a “subtext of radiance and some sort of inherent faith in life.”

It wasn’t until well into the 19th century that the first device to record sound waves would be invented. Thanks to these new technologies, today we can listen to our favorite concerts, sonatas, symphonies and operas from the comfort of our homes. What did our ancestors from the baroque period do to enjoy, for example, their favorite aria from an opera? This album provides us with our answer, providing us a glimpse into a small portion of music history: Musical arrangements.

Formed in 2016, the Quatuor Agate derives its name from one of the most beautiful chamber music pieces, Johannes Brahms’s Second Sextet, dedicated to his second love, Agathe von Siebold. Seven years later, this fascination with Brahms materialized with the release of their debut album in February 2024, featuring the complete String Quartets under Appassionato, le label.

Deep Purple's definitive Mark II lineup reunited for 1984's Perfect Strangers. It is one of the better examples of a reunion album, although the band's uneasy camaraderie only lasted a few more years. "Knocking at Your Back Door" opens the album with a roar. Ian Gillan's lyrics don't make much sense, but Ritchie Blackmore's guitar riffs and Ian Paice's thunderous drumming carry this song as well as the rest of the album. The robotic rhythm of the title cut relies on Jon Lord's organ work. The 1999 remastered reissue features the bonus track "Son of Alerik." This fascinating, mid-tempo, ten-minute instrumental was the B-side of the "Perfect Strangers" 12" single in the U.K.

During the 1960s and '70s, Herbie Mann continually searched for new playing contexts in which to place his flute. In December 1973, he traveled to London for five days of recording with a group of British rock musicians. The result was London Underground, an album tilted much more in a rock direction than the soul and R&B-drenched recordings he had been making for the previous five years. Highlights on this album include the Rolling Stones' "Bitch" (then-Stone Mick Taylor played guitar on this album), Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air," and "Paper Sun," from the Traffic canon. The real highlight, however, came about with the addition of Stephane Grappelli on the Donovan pop hit "Mellow Yellow."

Harvey Mason's 2014 effort, Chameleon, is an expansive and funky album that finds the journeyman jazz drummer exploring the space between the '70s post-bop/fusion albums that marked his early career and the contemporary smooth jazz work that has defined the latter half of his career. Having started out playing with the masterful pianist Erroll Garner, Mason eventually join Herbie Hancock's legendary Headhunters ensemble, with whom he recorded the original version of this album's title track. And while he went on to a successful career working with a bevy of artists including Lee Ritenour, George Benson, and others, it is primarily his work with Hancock that is Mason's focus here.

Although with Fluid Rustle, Eberhard Weber continued to draw upon the Watership Down references that cast 1977’s Silent Feet into such lovely relief, I hesitate to call it program music. Neither are the titles mere frames; they are also the open windows within those frames. Like the rabbits in Adams’s novel, each instrument in “Quiet Departures” is its own vivid personality in a vast warren of possibilities. Such strong metaphorical ties are there to be unraveled, one fiber at a time, by every strike of Gary Burton’s vibes. The introduction of Norma Winstone (in her first non-Azimuth ECM appearance) and Bonnie Herman represents an exciting tectonic shift in Weber’s geology, urging us through an atmospheric tunnel. At its end: a brightly lit solo from Burton, swaying comfortably in Weber’s hammock.

Wie spannend und aktuell auch die Beschäftigung mit über 200 Jahre alter Musik sein kann, zeigt unsere Edition aller Sinfonien von Michael Haydn sehr deutlich. Nun ist es mal wieder so weit: vier wundervolle Sinfonien sind produziert. Die Nummern 22, 23, 33 und 1C (Perger 1) stammen aus zwei Schaffensperioden Michael Haydns, die durch etwa 20 Jahre voneinander getrennt sind. Sie geben einen faszinierenden Einblick – sowohl in Haydns kompositorische Entwicklung als auch in die Vielfalt, die das Experimentierfeld Sinfonie jener Jahre bot. Die Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss unter Johannes Goritzki ist hörbar zum Michael-Haydn-Spezialisten geworden.

As the predecessors of Sony Classical, CBS Masterworks had not a catalogue of ""authenticity-minded"" recordings (the pioneering efforts of Raymond Leppard and Jean-Claude Malgoire notwithstanding), Sony made a distinctive new start and engaged indubitably one of the most experienced producers in the field of early music, Wolf Erichson. If the successes secured by such musicians as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Frans Brüggen in the 1960s were the most visible signs to a wider audience of thorough-going change in the interpretation of music from medieval to baroque times, there was no doubt in assigning a part of the general success to the work of the production teams behind the recordings.

Julia Lezhneva, Franco Fagioli and Diego Fasolis: three stars of the Baroque unite to record Vivaldi’s most popular choral work. Julia Lezhneva – “a serene, sleek voice, beatific in timbre, with a bell-like resonance” (Financial Times) – adds the glorious solo motet Nulla in Mundo Pax Sincera. Franco Fagioli – “one of today's great vocal technicians” (The Guardian) – records the Nisi Dominus with its haunting ‘Cum Dederit’. Diego Fasolis and I Barocchisti are today’s Vivaldi interpreters par excellence.

Polydor's Level Best is a thorough, successful overview of the smooth, jazzy British sophisti-pop outfit, containing all of their biggest hits and best material, including the sublime "Something About You." At 18 tracks, it may run a little long, but it still is as comprehensive a summary of Level 42's career as could be hoped.

A great deal of today's Celtic music has ventured far from its roots, adding a wash of new age keyboards and heavenly harmony. Fortunately for hardcore traditionalists, singers and musicians like Andy Irvine stick closer to their acoustic roots. Even when Irvine writes his own songs, they retain a strong flavor of traditional music. Way Out Yonder is a lovely album comprised of a number of ballads and jigs, and filled with good singing and fitting arrangements. Irvine adds words to the "The Girl I Left Behind," a song of love, betrayal, and reborn love. An American version of this piece, "Forsaken Love," ends in suicide, so this more upbeat version, while still melancholy, is refreshing. "Gladiators" covers the biography of one Tom Barker, a radical union worker (a Wobbly) from Australia who fought against conscription during WW I. "They'll Never Believe It's True/Froggy's Jig" conjures up Irish folklore in the form of faeries dancing, while the title cut is a lively Bulgarian jig with some nice harmonica work by Brendan Power. Many of the songs on Way Out Yonder are long because Irvine likes to spin a yarn, and fortunately for the audience, he's good at it. The acoustic guitars and whistles underline the music perfectly.

To mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of Tallis, here are his biggest and best church compositions, performed in its customary high style by the Oxford Camerata under Jeremy Summerly (whose Fauré Requiem remains one of Naxos's all-time bestsellers). Tallis's youthful motet Salve intemerata is among the longest single-movement works of the 16th century, but it is Spem in alium, a work of Tallis's maturity, that overshadows any other English piece of the period, including those of his great contemporary, William Byrd. Scored for 40 independent voices, it is symphonic in proportion and resplendent in this surround-sound version.