Le Comte Ory tells the story of a libidinous and cunning nobleman who disguises himself first as a hermit and then as a nun ("Sister Colette") in order to gain access to the virtuous Countess Adele, whose brother is away at the Crusades. The 2011 Met production was directed by the Tony Award-winning Broadway director Bartlett Sher, who in recent years has also staged Il barbiere di Siviglia and Les Contes d'Hoffman for the Met. Sher presented the action as an opera within an opera, updated the action by a few centuries and giving the costume designer, Catherine Zuber, the opportunity to create some particularly extravagant headgear.

With the belief that “No opera loses so much as Die Zauberflöte if one strips it of its drama and that means, above all, the spoken dialogue,” René Jacobs’ agenda in Die Zauberflöte is to rehabilitate the reputation of Schikaneder’s libretto. At the heart of his reassesment is the idea that Schikaneder and Mozart’s Masonic message is deeper and more carefully presented than we have thought. He suggests that seemingly silly or inconsistent aspects of the story are put there as intentional false paths as the audience, not only the prince and the bird catcher, undergoes its own trials of initiation. The opera’s symbolism and structure are explained in convincing detail in an essay in the booklet by the Egyptologist and Mozart researcher Jan Assman.

This is the second instalment in our series devoted to Tchaikovsky’s three great ballets. The first recording, of The Sleeping Beauty, was praised upon its release, described by a reviewer in American Record Guide as ‘one of the finest I’ve heard’. Here Neeme Järvi and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra present the complete version of Swan Lake, with the pre-eminent James Ehnes lending his magic to the violin solos. This was Tchaikovsky’s first full-length ballet, but its premiere in 1877, staged at Moscow’s Bolshoy Theatre, was by no means a resounding success. According to most accounts, the choreography was inept, the shabby sets and costumes were borrowed from other productions, and the orchestral playing was poor. Most ballet companies today base their productions on the 1895 revival by the distinguished choreographer Marius Petipa.

A PRETTY SONG is Teensville's twelfth offering in their acclaimed Sunshine, Soft & Studio Pop compact disc series. Featuring an array of 31 never-before-on-CD cuts spanning the era 1966-1972, the disc highlights the neglected side of well produced but non-hit commercial material.

Billy Strayhorn's music has been an essential part of DiMartin's repertoire since the beginning of his forty-five year professional music career. He recalls, "My first encounter with Strayhorn's music was through an older cousin who gave me a recording of Chet Baker and Russ Freeman's version of Lush Life and requested that I learn the tune." DiMartino was just 15 years old at the time (ironically, Strayhorn's age when he wrote the piece0> John has been entranced with the composer's music ever since.

This collection includes demos of songs recorded by The Kingston Trio and for Stewart’s classic California Bloodlines album.

ESP-Disk' has a little bit of history with Argentina – we issued Gato Barbieri's first international release, and our Steve Lacy album was recorded there – so we couldn't resist putting out this compilation of 2012-17 recordings (most previously unreleased) from the Buenos Aires scene. In his liner notes, compiler Jason Weiss writes, "In June 1966, just as General Juan Carlos Onganía was leading a military coup d’état, Steve Lacy’s quartet arrived in Buenos Aires: not exactly safe harbor for free jazz. Despite opposition the group gained a small following, appearing on television, at a museum, in private homes, but they couldn’t earn enough for their return flights. When the quartet—Lacy, Enrico Rava, Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, a supergroup in retrospect—played at the venerable Instituto di Tella, whose experimental music center was directed by the composer Alberto Ginastera, Lacy instructed the group to do two free improvised sets of twenty minutes each; it proved to be their only document of the whole adventure, released by ESP the following year as The Forest and the Zoo."