Introducing an ambitious debut release, Warner Classics brings you a teriffic album with Baritone Huw Montague Wendell who flexes his extensive variety of talent and style! 'Contempation' stretches across three centuries, a journey into the transformation of musical dramas of opera, operetta, lied and Broadway musicals. Joining the stage is Canadian soprano Elisabeth Boudreault in which she and Huw perform a duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.

The Lautten Compagney is one of the most renowned and creative baroque instrument ensembles in Germany. Their concerts, under the artistic direction of Wolfgang Katschner, have fascinated audiences for three decades. With their infectious joy in performing and their innovative concepts, these ‘early musicians’ effortlessly translate the musical language of the Baroque to the present. Whether it’s as a solo chamber ensemble or an opera orchestra, the ensemble is continually crossing boundaries and seeking out encounters with new sounds and other art forms.

Così, an opera without words is a delightful arrangement of Mozart’s famous opera, Così fan tutte for wind quintet. Originally conceived and performed by Montréal’s Pentaèdre for the 2006 Festival de Lanaudière, this version preserves the opera’s melodic lines, touching sincerity and great beauty while challenging the listener with a new way of perceiving Mozart’s music. Pentaèdre’s international reach continues to grow, with 40 concerts in Europe, The United Kingdom and Russia during the current season alone.

The second album by Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow was a groundbreaking piece of folk-rock-based psychedelia, and it hit like a shot heard round the world; where the later efforts from bands like the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and especially, the Charlatans, were initially not too much more than cult successes, Surrealistic Pillow rode the pop charts for most of 1967, soaring into that rarefied Top Five region occupied by the likes of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on, to which few American rock acts apart from the Byrds had been able to lay claim since 1964. And decades later the album still comes off as strong as any of those artists' best work.

Each era of rock music has had its own craftily marketed phenomenon – it was the "live album" in the '70s, "unplugged" recordings in the '90s, and since the late '80s through the present day, the "tribute album." But the early 21st century saw another addition – veteran bands revisiting classic albums and performing them in their entirety. Jethro Tull's most enduring release is largely agreed to be 1971's classic Aqualung, and in late 2004 Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, and their latest Tull mates dusted off the album once more in front of a small audience for XM Radio's Then Again Live series.

As the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) had done a year earlier, Super Session (1968) initially ushered in several new phases in rock & roll's concurrent transformation. In the space of months, the soundscape of rock shifted radically from short, danceable pop songs to comparatively longer works with more attention to technical and musical subtleties. Enter the unlikely all-star triumvirate of Al Kooper (piano/organ/ondioline/vocals/guitars), Mike Bloomfield (guitar), and Stephen Stills (guitar) – all of whom were concurrently "on hiatus" from their most recent engagements. Kooper had just split after masterminding the groundbreaking Child Is Father to the Man (1968) version of Blood, Sweat & Tears. Bloomfield was fresh from a stint with the likewise brass-driven Electric Flag, while Stills was late of Buffalo Springfield and still a few weeks away from a full-time commitment to David Crosby and Graham Nash. Although the trio never actually performed together, the long-player was notable for idiosyncratically featuring one side led by the team of Kooper/Bloomfield and the other by Kooper/Stills.

With about seven years of downtime on the recording front, Isaac Hayes burst to life again in 1995 with not one but two albums, released simultaneously with cover art that merges together when placed side by side. One was a collection of old demos and new instrumental tracks (Raw and Refined), but the other - the disc at hand - was a brand-new package hearkening back to Hayes' old extravagant ways. In a major attempt to restart his commercial engines, Hayes goes so far as to record in his original headquarters, Memphis, gathering around him many old cronies - most notably his old writing partner from the Sam & Dave days, David Porter, and guitarists Michael Toles and Skip Pitts from the Stax period. Once again, Hayes attempts to transform well-known pop hits into wide-screen spectaculars, and he revisits tunes and ideas from his heyday…