Gavin Higgins’ music is bursting with authenticity. Everything he writes speaks in some way of where he comes from, of the land, of the community, of the family which formed him. He grew up in a working class former mining community in the Forest of Dean, a borderland between England and Wales with its own dialect, a liminal place where Welsh songs and stories as well as English are in the air. It’s a place where brass band music is the chief legacy of the coal mines, the last of which closed a decade before Gavin was born and where the forest, with its sounds, its colours and its stories was a constant presence.

A stunning Wagner collection featuring all the major overtures and preludes (including the very rare and very beautiful ‘Die Feen’ – The Fairies), this collection is also noteworthy for other reasons. For a start, it brings together in a single collection the complete Decca Wagner recordings of Zubin Mehta and the complete Philips Wagner recordings of Edo de Waart. It also features two further rarities – Wagner’s early Symphony (with the San Francisco Symphony and Edo de Waart) and a tiny choral piece – ‘Kinderkatechismus’ – an absolute Decca rarity and much sought-after by collectors.

Major share in the pleasure Ziani's oratorio gives, the excellent singer, especially Furio Zanasi, who is David draws sensitively with his velvety soft baritone, and Giampaolo Bassoonto as an agile narrator. At Alan Curtis' sensitive line, they're reaching an er- count density and representational presence, which to breathless listening.

Until recently, so much of this first opera that Handel wrote for Italy was lost that it was unviable to stage it. The rediscovery of the missing material, a triumph of scholarly detective work, reveals the confident high spirits which characterise so much of Handel’s music during his Italian visit. It lacks the instrumental colours of his more lavish London productions, with many arias supported by continuo alone. All are here, complete (even six which Handel himself discarded), but many are brief and, under Curtis’s lively direction, the dramatic tension builds up splendidly.

Michael Nyman came of age as a classical composer in the radical London of the late '60s. His work embraces multiple vernaculars (jazz, avant garde, conceptual art) and helped cement the foundation of what came to be known as minimalism. Decades into his career, Nyman's score to Jane Campion's film The Piano made him a star. The movie's themes of colonialism and silence (its protagonist, portrayed by Holly Hunter, cannot speak) were perfectly aligned with his longtime interests in world and ambient music. Horn players assist members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra in fleshing out Nyman's stately, hymn-like motifs. On the more heavily orchestrated cues, sentimentality wins out over minimalist restraint; the best tracks feature Nyman on solo piano, playing the rudimentary, faux period repertoire of Hunter's character.

The recent ‘discovery’ of the music of Cecile Chaminade (1857-1944) belies the fact that in the early years of the 20th century she was immensely popular, touring both Europe and the US as a pianist, exclusively in her own music. Changing fashions brought an abrupt end to this fame, but in the first thirty years of the recording industry, over 80 discs of her piano music alone were released. Her own discs from 1901, presented complete here, are some of the earliest by a classical pianist. Many of her most popular pieces were recorded multiple times, but this set presents chronologically at least one version of every work recorded on 78s and introduces as many different pianists as practical.

Peter, Paul and Mary is the debut studio album by American folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, released in May 1962 on Warner Bros. Records. Released in both mono and stereo on catalog no. 1449, it is one of the rare folk albums to reach No. 1 on the Billboard chart in the US, where it remained for over a month. The lead-off singles "If I Had a Hammer" and "Lemon Tree" reached numbers 10 and 35 respectively on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. It was the group's biggest selling studio album, eventually certified Double Platinum for U.S. sales. At the Grammy Awards of 1963, their recording of "If I Had a Hammer" won the Best Folk Recording and Best Performance by a Vocal Group Grammies.

Cuts Both Ways is the debut solo album by American recording artist Gloria Estefan and final album with Miami Sound Machine, as they would become her backup band for her solo career after its release. Although Estefan's name is on the front cover, the album credits Estefan and Miami Sound Machine (as with the previous album, Let It Loose).

40 of the greatest by Joe Walsh's early group from the late '60s / early '70s, including 'Funk #49', 'Walk Away', 'Take A Look Around', 'Bluebird' and an exclusive interview with the band's original drummer Jim Fox. Also contains many tracks recorded with Tommy Bolin after Joe Walsh went solo.

Pianist Lise de la Salle has a big tone and a strong technique, but while she is surely up to the technical requirements of Prokofiev's and Shostakovich's first piano concertos, she seems out of her depth in their interpretive demands. She can pound her way through the muscular rhythms and massive sonorities in the outer movements of Prokofiev's concerto but appears immune to the lyrical poetry in the legato lines of the work's central Andante assai.

This 25-song CD (originally a shorter LP called The Singles Album) is a handy collection of the band's most well-known English tracks from 1963 through 1966, plus their B-sides and some songs off of EPs that charted high in the U.K. Except for the final three songs – "Groovin'," "Can't Believe It," and "Did You Have to Do That?," none of which are that easy to find on compilations – it's all assembled in chronological order from their debut single "Why Should We Not" to 1966's "You Gave Me Somebody to Love." The notes by John Tobler are a bit superficial, and the American EMI Manfred Mann: The Definitive Collection is a little more adventurous. Also, the sound here doesn't match the presence and clarity of more recent 24-bit transfers. Nonetheless, this is a respectable compilation for the novice or the casual fan. The presence of the B-sides, including lost gems like "What Did I Do Wrong" (a killer Chess-style blues number written by Tom McGuinness) and the Goffin/King-authored "Oh No Not My Baby" (one of Paul Jones's greatest R&B-style performances), assures that one gets a truer picture of the band's output and their focus on R&B, jazz, blues, and folk, than the A-sides by themselves would provide.

Andrea Bacchetti follows his album of sonatas by Baldassarre Galuppi with another little-performed 18th century Venetian, Benedetto Marcello, whose work has a surprisingly modern character. The "Sonata III", for instance, opens with a sequence in which the right hand plays the same note 48 times in rapid succession, while the left cycles quadruplets around it – the kind of gambit you'd expect from a Cage or Feldman, but hardly from a contemporary of Vivaldi. Marcello is said to have once fallen into a grave that opened beneath him, a trauma perhaps responsible for the austere, near-spiritual logic of pieces such as the "Sonata V", where the absence of frills prefigures the enigmatic miniatures of Erik Satie.

Originally released as MGM E-4384 in August 1966. Tracks 13, 14, 15 released on 'Animalization' MGM SE-4384 (Stereo Version).

Now, Grapefruit has finally unearthed the full, definitive story. After two decades of planning, research, tape transfer and sound restoration, 'Beeside: The Complete Recordings' features over two hours of music recorded by Tintern Abbey between the summer of 1967 (when they spent a month in a Cornwall cottage, rehearsing and taping their performances prior to their London launch) and the end of 1968. Featuring more than 90 minutes of previously unreleased and unheard material, indeed, everything on the 68-minute Disc Two is now receiving it's first-ever public airing. Alongside that genre-defining Deram single and those previously-leaked demos are some astonishing treasures. Included are two finished masters of the intended late 1967 follow-up 45 'Snowman' (a disorientating melange of sinister Mellotron, disembodied voices and backward tapes that was abandoned when original guitarist Don Smith left the group); the Arabic-sounding 'My Prayer' and the 'SF Sorrow'-anticipating 'Let The Wind Blow', along with late 1968 creations like 'Raspberry Ripple', 'Life Goes By' and 'My House' suggesting that, even at the point of their collapse, Tintern Abbey remained a vital, vibrant unit. Featuring a new 6000 word essay with band quotes and previously unpublished photos and memorabilia, this lovingly-assembled 2-CD set is the final word on a group that turned out to be as mysterious and elusive as the Wordsworth poem that inspired their name.

It's Hard is the tenth studio album by English rock band the Who. Released in September 1982, it was the final Who album to feature bassist John Entwistle, who died in 2002. It was also the second and final Who studio album with drummer Kenney Jones, as well as the last to be released on Warner Bros. Records in the US. It was released on Polydor Records in the UK, peaking at No. 11, and on Warner Bros. in the US where it peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. The US rights to both this album and Face Dances subsequently reverted to the band, who then licensed them to MCA Records (later Geffen Records, itself once distributed by WB) for reissue. The album achieved gold status in the US in November 1982. It was their last album for over two decades until Endless Wire in 2006.