By condensing the sonic explorations of Meddle to actual songs and adding a lush, immaculate production to their trippiest instrumental sections, Pink Floyd inadvertently designed their commercial breakthrough with Dark Side of the Moon. The primary revelation of Dark Side of the Moon is what a little focus does for the band. Roger Waters wrote a series of songs about mundane, everyday details which aren't that impressive by themselves, but when given the sonic backdrop of Floyd's slow, atmospheric soundscapes and carefully placed sound effects, they achieve an emotional resonance. But what gives the album true power is the subtly textured music, which evolves from ponderous, neo-psychedelic art rock to jazz fusion and blues-rock before turning back to psychedelia. It's dense with detail, but leisurely paced, creating its own dark, haunting world…

The majority of Mayall and the Bluesbreakers' best material from the early '70s is collected on this 29-track, double-disc set. Although Clapton appears on a couple of songs, the playing on Room to Move isn't as universally breathtaking as it is on London Blues, but the collection is thoroughly listenable, and it does feature many fine musicians.

For many years Tangerine Dream have been very much into the soundtrack business, and most of them have been released on CDs. In early 1996 appeared one of their probably most surprising releases. Zoning is a German thriller produced 1986/87, which could be seen on TV screen for a few times only and then disappeared. Without any information before, it had been re-released in the video format nearly ten years later, accompanied by a soundtrack CD with the music of TD used for this video. Edgar Froese had recorded and mixed the whole score in 1994, eight years after TD produced the first version of this soundtrack. Thus, most of the music on this CD sounds quite different from the original film score; the musical style fits more into the previously unreleased material from Edgar Froese's Beyond The Storm…

Handel’s Messiah is already very well represented on the market with dozens of existing recordings and new productions appearing at regular intervals. Yet this is a very special version, carefully crafted by the Prague-based Collegium Vocale and Collegium 1704 under the baton of Vaclav Luks, founder of the ensemble and one of the most exciting conductors of the Baroque and Classical repertoire. The fine young singers Giulia Semenzato, Benno Schachtner, Krystian Adam, and Krešimir Stražanac joined the ensembles for two moving live performances in Prague’s Rudolfinum in March 2018, and those performances are now presented here.

Beethoven's second set of quartets, Opus 59, inhabit a very different universe from that of his first set, Opus 18. Although only six years had passed since the publication of the Opus 18 quartets, Beethoven's style changed immensely. The Opus 59 quartets were composed in the wake of the "Eroica" Symphony, and the vastness of the individual movements; the symphonic, orchestral character of the string writing; and the stretched formal boundaries led some critics to dub the first of the set an "Eroica" for string quartet.

Brahms’ string concertos are indissolubly linked with the musicians for whom the works were written. He wrote his Violin Concerto for Joseph Joachim, and in it he combined what a contemporary critic termed ‘the great and serious’ with songful lyricism, melodic beauty, and a fiery Hungarian finale. To mend a breach with the violinist, Brahms later composed a concerto with the unusual combination of violin and cello, the latter played at the premiere by Joachim’s colleague Robert Hausmann. Neither instrument predominates in a work of reconciliation that embodies both drama and reflection.

Nucleus were a pioneering jazz-rock band from Britain who continued in different forms from 1969 to 1989. They were led by Ian Carr, who had been in the Rendell–Carr Quintet during the mid and late 1960s, and was a respected figure in British jazz for more than forty years. Their jazz-based music evolved from an early sound incorporating elements of progressive and psychedelic rock toward combination with a funkier sound in the mid and late 1970s. Elastic Rock is Nucleus' first album. Recorded in January 1970, it was a pioneering work in emerging genre of jazz-rock fusion.

Members of what would become IBIS (Sweden) started out in a band called VILDKAKTUS that mixed rock with various influences of jazz and folk and had some similarities with TRAFFIC. After releasing three albums as VILDKAKTUS, the main core of the band consisting of keyboardist Gosta NILSSON, guitarist Olle NILSSON and bassist Tommy JOHNSON was joined by the drummer Petur ISLAND; at that point they renamed themselves as IBIS and released their self-titled debut in 1974. Music of IBIS was more in the jazz direction of progresive rock then their earlier VILDKAKTUS material, with some touches from the Canterbury scene as well.

Johann Christoph Graupner (1683-1760) was a German Baroque composer with over 1,500 published works to his credit, yet hardly anyone recognizes his name anymore. He worked as Kapellmeister at the Hesse court in Darmstadt for almost fifty years, composing both secular and religious music, and he might have gotten the music director's post in Leipzig that went to J.S Bach instead had Graupner's patron allowed him leave.

Purists may object and traditionalists may blanch, but for Bach fans with an open mind, this disc of harpsichord transcriptions of four of his solo violin works will be more fun than a barrel full of fugues. Although skillfully and soulfully performed by Dutch harpsichordist Bob van Asperen, the works themselves will take some getting used to. After all, where did the rolled chords, lush arpeggios, and additional counterpoints come from and what exactly are they doing in Bach's already wonderfully clean textures? But if the listener can get past any initial preconceptions and any aural memory of the originals, these performances can be tremendously enjoyable.

Polymath Sir Stephen Hough has a growing reputation as a composer of chamber, choral and above all solo piano music with four sonatas and a constellation of dazzling arrangements to his name. This album presents the premiere recording of his first piano concerto, recorded by the pianist with The Hallé under Sir Mark Elder. Its subtitle ‘The world of yesterday’ deliberately places the work in a broader context of the pianist-virtuosi of yesteryear who composed and performed their own piano concertos as they toured the world.