This 1961 groove date by Stanley Turrentine is an example of him at his fiery peak. Far from the slow groover of the CTI years, Turrentine's early Blue Note sides were massive and bright, saturated in deep soul and blues. This set featured Turrentine's wife, organist and composer Shirley Scott, and a pair of alternating rhythm sections. The first is Major Holley on bass and Al Harewood on drums, and the second is with Sam Jones and Clarence Johnston. Latin Conguero Ray Barretto appeared with the Holley/Harewood band. The set opens with a stomping version of Lloyd Price's "Trouble," with Scott taking the early solo while driving the groove…

Celeste is an RPI band from Sanremo, Italy that formed in 1972. The band put an album in 1976, disbanded in 1977, and reformed in 2016. In January 2019, they finally released a new album called "Il Risveglio del Principe" with new material. This is excellent Italian Prog that has a lot of classical influence and undertones of folk music and jazz. The music is mostly pastoral, but it is anything but boring. It is quite beautiful and relaxing and it never seems to get cliché or stale.

Japanese project Asturias has had an unpredictable history, initially forming around multi-instrumentalist and composer Yoh Ohyama in the late Eighties, with a reworked line-up appearing about fifteen years ago. Since that comeback in 2003, the predominantly instrumental group jumps between `Acoustic' and `Electric' Asturias discs, and like other bands from the same country - Ain Soph and Ptf instantly come to mind - the band/s combine a symphonic grandiosity with the dynamic fire of jazz/fusion, and their latest work under the `Electric' banner, 2019's `Trinity' offers violin and piano constantly met with electric guitar and keyboard colour, all delivered with a cracking energy, nuanced emotion and supreme technical musical precision.

Tolib-khon Shakhidi is a Tajik composer who trained and began his career under the musical regime of the Soviet Union. His music was occasionally performed and recorded during the Soviet era but really requires modern audio standards to come alive, at least to judge from the percussion-heavy orchestral works recorded here. The involvement of a conductor of Valery Gergiev's stature (and of the top-rank London Symphony Orchestra and Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra) apparently resulted from sheer enthusiasm on the part of the conductor, who grew up in central Asian Ossetia.

Between 1958 ansd 1961, the Azerbaijani composer, Arif Melikov brought together the strongest elements within the Russian and Soviet ballet tradition to create the score titled Legend of Love. It was the first large-scale work written by the 28-year-old composer, and eventually brought him worldwide fame. “The Legend helped me see the world”, he remembered.

“an inexorable force that seemed to come from nowhere but infact had been cleverly prepared for. This is the kind of work that reveals the LSO itself as a real community of an orchestra, a collection of talented individuals responding to Mahler's every solo opportunity but dedicated to a common cause"

Ira Dei is the thirteenth studio album by the Spanish folk metal band Mägo de Oz.

Valery Gergiev's Mahler cycle with the London Symphony Orchestra seems now to have found its identity and this thrilling account of the 'Resurrection' Symphony, heard on the second of two consecutive evening performances, bore many of the hallmarks that have distinguished the series so far: dramatic, driven and occasionally impatient.

When Gustav Mahler began his First Symphony in 1884, ‘modern music’ meant Wagner, while the standard by which new symphonies were judged was that of Brahms, the arch ‘classical-romantic’. In a Brahmsian symphony there was little room for Wagnerian lush harmonies, or sensational new orchestral colours. In fact the orchestral forces Brahms employed were basically the same as those used by Beethoven and Schubert in their symphonies, three-quarters of a century earlier.

Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov is one of the contenders for the mantle of hot new Russian phenomenon, and he is gifted with the rare combination of incredible speed and a fairly natural manner in slower lyric material. Here he takes on the thankless task of creating something new out of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23, which he, like every other winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition going back to Van Cliburn, has been given the opportunity to record.

Doro Pesch has announced that she’ll soon release a new four-track EP. It’s titled Backstage To Heaven and will launch on March 8 via Nuclear Blast to coincide with her European tour. It's Doro's first release since last year's Forever Warriors, Forever United album. The EP will include two studio tracks: Backstage To Heaven featuring Helge Schneider and Heartbroken, which sees a guest appearance from Doug Aldrich. The other two songs are live cuts: Blood, Sweat And Rock’N’Roll and If I Can’t Have You No One Will, which features Amon Amarth’s Johan Hegg.