The Czech Philharmonic and it's Chief Conductor and Music Director Semyon Bychkov present a new recording of Bedrich Smetana's masterpiece Ma vlast (My Homeland). The album celebrates both the bicentenary of Smetana's birth and, the start of 2024's Year of Czech Music which has been celebrated every ten years since Smetana's 100th anniversary in 1924. Ma vlast (1874-1878) is a potent symbol of the Czech Republic's turbulent political history and has played an important role in the Czech national movement. Contemplating the landscape, history, and legends of Bohemia, Ma vlast is best known for it's world-famous Moldau melody.

From their beginnings as an attempt at bold jazz-rock fusion in 1967 through a run as a high-powered R&B/soul-rock singles act with singer David Clayton-Thomas two years later, Blood, Sweat & Tears were always a kind of fascinating experiment, and a commercially successful one at that. The first album from the Clayton-Thomas-fronted band appeared in 1969, spawned four high chart hits, won a Grammy as Album of the Year, and went on to sell some three million units. The next two albums, Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 and 4, generated a few more hits, but the band was gradually running out of creative steam by this point, and when Clayton-Thomas left the group after the fourth album, well, that was the end of the line commercially for Blood, Sweat & Tears. A jazzier, but definitely not as commercial, version of Blood, Sweat & Tears showed up for two of the albums collected in this set, 1972's New Blood and 1973's No Sweat, with the third album here, 1976's More Than Ever, featuring the return of David Clayton-Thomas to the fold.

Just like the title says – 17 of Fricke's biggest hits from her the early '80s, including the number ones "He's A Heartache (Looking for a Place to Happen)", "It Ain't Easy Bein' Easy", "Don' Worry 'Bout Me Baby", and "Your Heart's Not In It".

Under the direction of the Dresden cross organist Holger Gehring, experienced musicians have teamed up to interpret these works in a way as close as possible to the original. The recording is based on detailed research that reconstructs both the original decoration art and tempo selection as well as the original mood. The so-called lying organ of the Kreuzkirche Dresden is used. This also meets the historical performance situation where the concerting composer conducted the orchestra from a specially made organ with lying pipes. This creates an extraordinarily interesting view of Handel's work in London.

Bruhns was one of Buxtehude’s most talented pupils, impressing his contemporaries with his skills as an organist just as much as with his talents as a violinist and as a singer. He died at the age of 32, leaving five organ pieces (RIC204) and twelve sublime Cantatas that form an evident link between Buxtehude’s religious music and J.S. Bach’s. This programme is rounded off with the cantata Erbarm dich by Lovies Busbetsky, another Buxtehude pupil, which formed the inspiration for one of J.S. Bach’s chorale preludes.

These six Quartets for flute, violin, viola/viola da gamba and continuo are puzzling on almost all counts. Though printed in Paris in 1752 they are not part of the genuine ‘Paris Quartet’ set of 1738. Nor are they incontrovertibly the work of Telemann. But on stylistic grounds it does seem likely, though we should not rule out an imitator, French perhaps, who in collusion with the publisher saw an opportunity to make some money following the enormous success of Telemann’s Paris visit in 1737-8.

Antonio Caldara composed during the most flourishing period of the Baroque. While his contemporaries - Handel, Bach, Scarlatti and Vivaldi - are today held in higher esteem, in his own day, Caldera's vocal output was much celebrated. 18th century music critic Charles Burney called him "one of the greatest professors both for the Church and the stage that Italy can boast," and rated Caldera second only to Handel for his vocal writing. He was born in Venice to musical parents. He was a working musician from an early age as both contralto chorister and cellist at St. Mark's in Venice, at the same time composing vocal music.

The award-winning Academy for Old Music Berlin celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2022 with "Paul Wranitzky: Symphonies". The Süddeutsche Zeitung praises it as "one of the very great ensembles of its kind". Since its founding in 1982, the ensemble has been one of the world's leading chamber orchestras for historical music and proves its versatility again and again with exciting concert projects and musical exploration.

Austrian vocalist Udo Jürgens is best known as the winner of the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest. But a career that spans over four decades has established him as one of the European mainland's most popular performers; his combined international sales exceed over 100 million units. Jürgens was born on September 30, 1934, in Klagenfurt, Austria. He was just 16 when he won an Austrian radio songwriting competition with "Je T'Aime." His success built from there over the next decade and, in 1961, he scored his first international hit when his composition "Reach for the Stars" was recorded by Shirley Bassey. Three years later, Matt Monro was similarly successful with Jürgens' "Walk Away" – a song that the Englishman first encountered at the 1964 Eurovision Song Contest, where Jürgens, representing Austria, performed it in its original language as "Warum Nur Waru." Jürgens finished fifth in the 1964 Eurovision event; the following year he finished fourth with "Sag Ihr, Ich Lass Sie Grüben." The third time proved the charm: he sang "Merci Chérie" to glory in 1966. (English singer Vince Hill promptly scored a U.K. hit with an English-language version of the song.)

It should come as no surprise that Enrique Iglesias' 2008 Greatest Hits begins in 1999, when he made the leap from the Latin market into the mainstream. All his very successful '90s albums on Fonovisa are bypassed, written off as prehistory, so the spotlight shines only on his English-language singles of the new millennium: the club tracks and syrupy slow songs that gave him a significant number of crossover hits. With the exception of a couple of minor blips on the charts like 2000's "Sad Eyes," all these are here, starting with 1999's "Bailamos" and "The Rhythm Divine," running through 2000's "Be with You" and 2001's "Hero," stopping for 2004's "Not in Love," winding up with 2007's "Do You Know? (The Ping Pong Song)" and wrapping up with two new duets, "Away" with Sean Garrett and "Takin' Back My Love" with Ciara. While this approach may lop off half of his career, it also does exactly what hits collections should do: it gives the casual listener the hits they want to hear and nothing else.

Romain Leleu and his musical partner Julien Gernay, captivated by the sounds of the unique instruments in the Musée de la musique, invite us on a whirlwind tour around the land of the French trumpet and cornet. Other musicians have joined them to add a touch of horn and trombone to these pieces, whether originals or transcriptions of emblematic works from a ‘Belle Époque’ indeed!

Rock of Life is an album by Australian singer-songwriter Rick Springfield. It was released on RCA Records in 1988. The disc peaked at a modest #55 on the Billboard album chart, selling approximately 350,000 copies in United States. It was the least successful of Springfield's six RCA releases.

A compilation released in various territories outside the U.S., including the U.K., The Ultimate Collection covers Whitney Houston's career through 1998's My Love Is Your Love, containing most of the notable singles she released throughout the '80s and '90s. It's a fairly straightforward set, though there are some alternate mixes in place of original versions (including "I'm Your Baby Tonight"), which is not noted on the outside of the packaging. Some will find fault in the number of notable exclusions, including "Miracle," "You Give Good Love," "I Believe in You and Me," and "All the Man That I Need" – all of which were Top Ten R&B singles in the States. But that is more an issue of space than poor track selection.

Here is the 12th volume in the complete chronological recordings of Lionel Hampton as reissued by the Classics label. It opens with Hamp's final five recordings for the MGM label, waxed in Los Angeles on October 17, 1951. This was a 20-piece big band using charts written by Quincy Jones, and the music it made feels much different from what's to be heard in the next leg of Lionel Hampton's odyssey, a Norman Granz-produced quartet session with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Buddy Rich, recorded in New York on September 2, 1953. While the big band sides are exciting and fun, with a hip vocal by Sonny Parker on "Don't Flee the Scene Salty" and a singalong routine led by Hamp on "Oh Rock," the quartet swings cohesively, stretching out for six, seven or nearly eleven minutes, for the LP era had begun and Norman Granz encouraged extended improvisations. The combination of Oscar Peterson and Lionel Hampton, whether cooking together on "Air Mail Special" or savoring the changes of a ballad like "The Nearness of You" made spirits to soar and sparks to fly.

One thing is certain in this uncertain world – you can trust Ashley Hutchings to do interesting things with various areas of British folk and rock music. In the case of the Albion Dance Band, under its various names, the focus was on mutating traditional English dance and folk music, which led to escapades involving traditional tunes, Morris dancers, double drummers, dance callers, Philip Pickett's entire collection of medieval instruments, and serious rock guitar front lines that tend to leap onto the hay cart and start blazing away. The Prospect Before Us is particularly unusual, even for Hutchings and the Albions – a number of the tracks were recorded live in the studio, complete with dancing by the Albion Morris Men, an effort that resulted in some especially raucous moments: the bonus version of "Merry Sherwood Rangers" is far more staid than the live rendition that made it to the original version of this album. An essential purchase, we think.