Manfred Mann's 1980 album is a strange mix of topical songwriting, progressive rock, and power pop – from its opening seconds, the Earth Band is pressing serious messages and social commentary on their listenership amid swirling prog rock keyboards and catchy guitar hooks and choruses. The whole package is challenging in ways that should have put them on the cutting edge of rock music at the outset of that decade, but one suspects that Mann and company were too musically adept and sophisticated for their own good – a little dumbing down and maybe a little less musicianship on display would have made them more accessible to the coming MTV generation.

Rory Gallagher sounds inspired throughout JInx, gamely leading new drummer Brendan O'Neill and keyboardist Bob Andrews through the blues-rock paces, even though the guitarist's personal fortunes were on a downslide from which they would never recover. "Big Guns" and "Bourbon," the album's opening selections find Rory in full fiery form, tossing out muscular guitar lines and fiery solos with descriptive lyrics catering to his infatuation with American gangsters. The album also features two of his best, and least known, songs in the spooky, paranoid title track, complete with simmering sax section, boiling tom-tom drums as well as his own stealthy harmonica, and "Easy Come Easy Go," a beautiful, bluesy ballad where Rory double tracks his acoustic and electric guitars.

Ànv is the ninth studio album by Swiss folk metal band Eluveitie. The album was announced on 21 January 2025 and was released on 25 April 2025 through Nuclear Blast Records. It is Eluveitie's first studio album to feature hurdy-gurdy player and violinist Lea-Sophie Fischer, following the departures of Annie Riediger and Nicole Ansperger from the band in 2024. Eluveitie, formed in 2002 by Chrigel Glanzmann, has consistently merged modern metal with Celtic musical traditions. Originating from the Swiss Alps and deeply rooted in Celtic history, mythology, and spirituality, the band has become a cornerstone of the modern metal scene.

Joan Baez's second album, recorded when she was 20 years old, is a hearty helping of folk masterpieces that give ample evidence to exactly how she was established as a leader of the contemporary folk scene of the day. In August of 2001, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 was reissued in an audiophile remastered edition, with new annotation and containing three additional songs from the same sessions – all are a match for anything on the original album, and "I Once Loved a Boy" and "The Longest Train I Ever Saw" count among the saddest, most emotionally enveloping songs of Baez's early career.

The instrumental concerto occupies a very prominent place in the music of Krzysztof Penderecki. This fact is related to the great life force exhibited by this genre in twentieth century and in contemporary music. It is stimulated by commissions from virtuosos and by audience expectations; also favourable is the composers’ flexibility in approaching the form, whose chief idea continues to be the juxtaposition of the solo instrument and the orchestra. The violin and viola works presented on this CD are not only interesting, concrete realizations of the concertare idea in Penderecki’s music, but also examples of this composer’s sonic language and style in the period of his creativity which Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski called a "time of dialogue with the regained past".

Recorded during and immediately following R.E.M.'s disaster-prone Monster tour, New Adventures in Hi-Fi feels like it was recorded on the road. Not only are all of Michael Stipe's lyrics on the album about moving or travel, the sound is ragged and varied, pieced together from tapes recorded at shows, soundtracks, and studios, giving it a loose, careening charm. New Adventures has the same spirit of much of R.E.M.'s IRS records, but don't take the title of New Adventures in Hi-Fi lightly – R.E.M. tries different textures and new studio tricks. "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" opens the album with a rolling, vaguely hip-hop drum beat and slowly adds on jazzily dissonant piano. "E-Bow the Letter" starts out as an updated version of "Country Feedback," then it turns in on itself with layers of moaning guitar effects and Patti Smith's haunting backing vocals. Clocking in at seven minutes, "Leave" is the longest track R.E.M. has yet recorded and it's one of their strangest and best – an affecting minor-key dirge with a howling, siren-like feedback loop that runs throughout the entire song.

Considerado como el más grande polifonista español, Tomás Luis de Victoria compuso su famoso Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae en Roma, donde se publicó en 1585, poco antes de su regreso definitivo a España. El conjunto La Colombina, en su versión original de los años 90 (María Cristina Kiehr, Claudio Cavina, Josep Benet y Josep Cabré), interpreta aquí una selección de las músicas para el Viernes Santo, grabación que se completa con una sorprendente Pasión según San Juan de un contemporáneo de Victoria, Joan Pau Pujol. Esta grabación se publicó por primera vez en el sello Accent en 1997.

Giovanni Bononcini composed the four-part oratorio La Conversione di Maddalena for the Habsburg emperor Leopold I in 1701. The musician from Modena, at the time at the apex of his European fame, had at his disposal the best forces of the Imperial Chapel: four singers (two sopranos, a contralto and a bass) of top rate and an instrumental ensemble, limited to strings but adequately consistent to articulate a concert dialectic with tutti-concertino, including soloist pages for the violin, the cello and the viola da gamba.

Pianist Yundi, formerly Yundi Li, might have several reasons for trying something new with Chopin. It was with Chopin that he became the youngest and the first Chinese winner of the International Frédéric Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, at age 18 in 2000, and he has played Chopin countless times since then. Cynics might recall that a Yundi Chopin concerto performance crashed and burned several years ago owing to miscommunications between pianist and conductor. Whatever the case, Yundi here conducts the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra from the keyboard.