After 20 years of playing together, the Billy Hart Quartet, with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson & Ben Street, is distinguished by its stylistic openness. “If ever there was an example of contemporary jazz that draws extensively on all the ‘traditions’ while infusing some of the melodic clarity associated with the more challenging end of popular song, then this is it,” wrote critic Kevin Le Gendre of the quartet’s previous ECM album One Is The Other. A drummer of enormous experience, who has played through many of jazz’s idiomatic upheavals, Hart, now 83, advocates a ‘multi-directional’ sound approach & his younger confreres respond accordingly, each piece subtly opening another door. On Just, Iverson contributes four compositions, ranging from the sly, floating “Chamber Music” to the eruptively motoric “Aviation”. Turner and Hart bring three tunes apiece.

Kajetan Galas Organ Spot band returns after 12 years with a new album "Oitago", containing six original songs and two jazz standards. For several years, the trio has also performed in an enlarged line-up with saxophonist Marcin Kaletka. Oitago is a musical story inspired by the legend of a young musician Dżet-San, who discovered mystical wisdom flowing from a river. The Oitago philosophy, based on the harmony of life and music, has become a metaphor for the band's creative journey.

Innerhalb kurzer Zeit entschied sich Claudio Abbado zweimal, zusammen mit seinen Berlinern die gesamten Beethoven Sinfonien aufzunehmen. Die vorliegende zweite Aufnahme muss sich also zurecht der Frage stellen: War das wirklich nötig? Die Antwort ist simpel: Es war nötig, denn Abbado nahm zahlreiche Schönheitskorrekturen vor, wodurch ein Zyklus entstand, der mit Abstand das Beste ist, was in den letzten Jahren auf diesem Gebiet vorgestellt wurde, allerdings mit einigen kleinen Schönheitsfehlern.

Heritage presents the latest instalment in the ongoing series of BBC recordings of Havergal Brian symphonies. All four performances on this disc are conducted by champions of Brian’s music; Myer Fredman, Lionel Friend and Sir Charles Mackerras. The studio recordings are taken from the original tapes in the BBC archives and have been sensitively re-mastered.

Antonio Soler’s eminent position at the eighteenth-century Spanish court led to a series of important works, both sacred and secular. Of them, the best known are his keyboard sonatas, many of which were written for the young prince, Don Gabriel, son of Carlos III. The sonatas manage to absorb the influence of Domenico Scarlatti but also exude the prevailing modernist trends of Vienna. Some are designed in pairs, and many employ subtle echo effects, syncopation and exciting, athletic leaps that show his delight in repetition and contrast.

Rising stars mezzo-soprano Leandra Ramm and pianist Michael Delfín perform a wide range of vocal works by some of today’s leading, living composers. Experience an recording of contemporary music as Leandra Ramm and Michael Delfín present works for mezzo-soprano and piano by some of today’s most innovative living composers. This project features acclaimed pieces by Lisa Bielawa, Douglas Knehans, David T. Little, Cyril Deaconoff, and Daron Hagen, showcasing the unique talents of these creators who are defining the future of classical music.

Hounds of Love is a 1985 album by Kate Bush. It was Bush's fifth studio album, and her second to top the album charts. It has since been certified Double Platinum in the UK. In 2002, Q Magazine named Hounds of Love the third Greatest Album of All-Time by a Female Artist, and in 2000, the twentieth Greatest British Album of All Time. A 1997 CD re-release of the album included six bonus tracks: 12" mixes of "The Big Sky" and "Running Up That Hill"; and the B-side singles "Under The Ivy", "Burning Bridge", "My Lagan Love", and "Be Kind To My Mistakes".

The best-known alter ego of the Harry Vanda/George Young songwriting team (the creative force behind the Easybeats), Flash and the Pan began simply as a between-production project in 1976. By 1979, the project had turned out a novelty hit with the single "Hey St. Peter." A second single, "Down Among the Dead," also became a hit throughout Australia and Europe, inspiring the release of the album Flash and the Pan. American radio began playing import copies which led to a deal with Epic Records. The album would soon reach the Top 100 in the U.S. despite the lack of a supporting tour.

For a band whose useful lifespan ran to nine albums, 10cc have been oddly represented by the compilations market. Their first two albums, of course, have been reissued and rejigged in virtually every conceivable permutation; the next four have at least been bled for the hits on a near-annual basis. But a super-rare Japanese four-CD box set notwithstanding, no attempt has ever been made to truly illustrate the band's entire career, from "Donna" to demise. Welcome, then, The Ultimate Collection, which not only does a fine job in unearthing all you need to know about those nine original albums, it also splits the discs in such a way that the first one gives you all the hits you remember, while the second serves up the songs that you very likely missed altogether.

Maurizio Pollini (5 January 1942 – 23 March 2024) was an Italian pianist and conductor. He was known for performances of Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and the Second Viennese School, among others.

After the breakup, Beatles fans expected major statements from the three chief songwriters in the Fab Four. John and George fulfilled those expectations – Lennon with his lacerating, confessional John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Harrison with his triple-LP All Things Must Pass – but Paul McCartney certainly didn't, turning toward the modest charms of McCartney, and then crediting his wife Linda as a full-fledged collaborator on its 1971 follow-up, Ram. Where McCartney was homemade, sounding deliberately ragged in parts, Ram had a fuller production yet retained that ramshackle feel, sounding as if it were recorded in a shack out back, not far from the farm where the cover photo of Paul holding the ram by the horns was taken.

German conductor Otto Klemperer attended the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt-am-Main, studied violin and piano at the Klindworth-Scharwenka and Stern Conservatories in Berlin, and composition with the German composer Pfitzner. He made his début in Berlin in 1905, where he conducted fifty performances of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, not a work that would now be identified with Klemperer's serious and profoundly personal approach to music. Shortly afterwards, he visited Gustav Mahler in Vienna and impressed the composer by playing a scherzo from a Mahler symphony by memory at the piano. With Mahler's personal recommendation, Klemperer was appointed choirmaster and conductor at the German Opera in Prague. He held this post for three years, during which he returned to Vienna to assist in rehearsals for Mahler's later symphonies.

Albert Harris (1916–2005) was an English musician who worked in Hollywood for most of his life as an orchestrator, arranger and composer for several of the big film Studios and for such pop icons as Barbra Streisand, Roberta Flack and Cher. He was born in London and studied piano from age 6, becoming also a self-taught guitarist. His knowledge of the guitar enabled him in later years to compose pieces specifically for it (his Variations & Fugue on a Theme by Handel was recorded by Andrés Segovia). In the mid-1930s he began to make a name for himself as a session musician in London where he featured on many recordings, most notably as session guitarist with the Lew Stone band, his delicate but swinging improvisations enhancing many of Stone’s records during 1934/35. Harris came to New York in 1938 and started playing piano in big bands across the US then began studying at the NYU College of Music, where he earned a doctorate in 1944. He finished the PhD remotely, having moved to Los Angeles in 1942, where he studied composition with Mary Carr Moore and Eugen Zador and conducting with Richard Lert. He served as professor of orchestration at UCLA and was Assistant Musical Director for broadcaster NBC from 1946 to 1949.

Extras offers 26 B-sides, rarities and unreleased tracks that, while far from complete (the wonderful "See Saw" is absent, for instance), is a fan's dream come true. This is a fans' album, to be sure, but for fans, the never-before-heard demos (like "Burning Sky" and "Thick As Thieves") have a certain spine-tingling effect, and the covers (like "So Sad About Us," "And Your Bird Can Sing," and "Disguises") are undeniably fun – often more so than the covers they chose to include on the proper albums. Extras is not a good introduction, to be sure, but for the converted, this is essential.

Featuring several world-premiere recordings, the most comprehensive set ever released of Pizzetti’s song output.
Art song occupies a substantial space in Pizzetti’s oeuvre, with over 40 pieces, and yet the composer is still remembered mostly for his opera Murder in the Cathedral, and more tangentially for chamber and choral pieces such as the Cello Sonata and Requiem. Pizzetti composed songs for almost his entire life as a composer, starting with Nuvole (1899), a romanza still unpublished, up to the Tre canti d’amore, which belong to the group of his last works, from the second half of the 1950s.