Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos, yet even this tiny sample of six, written during the composer’s visit to Prague between 1730 and 1731, demonstrates in every movement his genius of harmonic and dramatic surprise. Each concerto is startlingly original, from the opening movement of the E Minor RV 278 that pits daring solo passages against a hypnotic, pulsing orchestra, while the same concerto’s Largo even feels modern in its angularity. A more familiar Vivaldi can be heard in the C Major RV 186, with its Italianate innocence and winsome middle Largo. But whatever the composer’s mood, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante thrill to his ingenuity at every step.

Cet oratorio postérieur au Messie passe pour avoir conservé les faveurs du public depuis sa création en 1747. Pourtant il n’existe actuellement que deux versions enregistrées disponibles, dont une seule sur instruments baroques. La sortie de cet enregistrement live de 2006, avec toute la technique la plus sophistiquée du moment, fait donc figure d’événement.

Georgy Sviridov, a leading composer of the late Soviet era in Russia, wrote a good deal of religious music, influenced by the Russian Orthodox legacy and by sacred works. The last years of Soviet rule saw a relaxation of official atheism, and these works earned Sviridov critical acclaim. Indeed, Sviridov greeted the Perestroika era and the impending fall of the Soviet Union with trepidation, and annotator Alexander Belonenko does well to compare the music here to Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil, written in 1915 in a similar period of instability. (The Red Easter, however, refers not to Communism but to texts printed in red in an Orthodox liturgy.) Sviridov's a cappella sacred music has a different effect than Rachmaninov's; he uses less of the sub-bass sounds of the Russian tradition.

Widely acclaimed as the Godfather of British blues, the late Alexis Korner boasts a reputation which is fully deserved.
As leader of Blues Incorporated, he was a pioneer of the genre, a Zelig-like presence and generous enabler who inspired a swathe of putative young blueshounds that included Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (as Richards once acknowledged, The Rolling Stones wouldn’t have existed without him), Eric Burdon and Eric Clapton.
But Korner was more than just a seismic influence, as Every Day I Have The Blues: The Sixties Anthology makes clear. Recorded in both a live and studio setting, this 3-CD set chronicles Korner’s musical activities throughout that most tumultuous of decades as he went from kick-starting the British blues boom to ending the Sixties in the company of a new generation of blues-rockers, thrilled to be enjoying the patronage of a much-loved elder statesman. Every Day I Have The Blues features tracks from such legendary British blues live documents as R&B From The Marquee and At The Cavern as well as a clutch of studio albums, with sensational lead vocal performances from the likes of Cyril Davies, Long John Baldry, Ronnie Jones, Herbie Goins, Duffy Power and Robert Plant, who was in the middle of recording an album with Korner when Led Zeppelin came calling.