When Kevin Godley and Lol Creme left 10cc in 1976 to pursue a solo career, many thought it was the death knell for the group. However, Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman kept the group alive as a duo (with the assistance of percussionist Paul Burgess) and turned in a surprisingly solid album with 1977's Deceptive Bends. It may lack the devil-may-care wackiness that popped up on previous 10cc albums, but it makes up for it by crafting a series of lush, catchy pop songs that are witty in their own right.

It's hard not to feel for Alice in Chains - all the guys in the band were lifers, all except lead singer Layne Staley, who never managed to exorcise his demons, succumbing to drug addiction in 2002. Alice in Chains stopped being a going concern long before that, all due to Staley's addictions, and it took guitarist Jerry Cantrell, bassist Mike Inez, and drummer Sean Kinney a long time to decide to regroup, finally hiring William DuVall as Staley's replacement and delivering Black Gives Way to Blue a full 14 years after the band's last album. To everybody's credit, Black Gives Way to Blue sounds like it could have been delivered a year after Alice in Chains: it's unconcerned with fashion; it's true to their dark, churning gloom rock; and if you're not paying attention too closely, it's easy to mistake DuVall for his predecessor…

A blip in the Byrds' discography that could easily be missed, as all of the songs from these pre-Mr. Tambourine Man sessions are also found on the much more widely available In the Beginning. Byrds fans really need to track this down, though, because six of the 11 cuts are actually entirely different versions than the ones that appear on In the Beginning, and in some cases the differences are substantial. "You Showed Me," in particular, appears here in a bare-bones, almost acoustic version with a heart-wrenching Gene Clark vocal; this is the sound of the Byrds at their very birth in the nest. It's a matter of taste, but the takes of "She Has a Way" and "Here Without You" on Preflyte are clearly superior to the ones used on In the Beginning, though the arrangements are very similar.

It was some years after founding the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century in 1981 that Frans Brüggen first turned his attention to the music of Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies and endeavoured to perceive that special orchestral landscape, in order to transform it into musical sound, with the use of period instruments rediscovering historical tonal colours. Now, his quest undimmed, Brüggen has submerged himself once more into the glories of Beethoven’s orchestral music for a new cycle being issued in a sumptuous new hybrid SACD box set by Glossa.

The energy and reliability of these performances are exemplary. The F sharp Suite is beset with all sorts of problems but they are not revealed here. The F minor Suite has splendid fugue and, as I have said before, couldn't Handel write a good fugue untrammelled by academia which sometimes the fugues of the great J.S. Bach may be.