Survival is Grand Funk Railroad's fourth studio album and was released in April 1971 by Capitol Records. It was produced by Terry Knight. The bonus tracks on the 2002 reissue labeled "Original Version" have extended sections and extra lyrics compared to the tracks as released on the original LP. "Feelin' Alright" is a different take of the song, as heard by the different inflections in the lead vocal, placement of the instruments in the stereo mix, and musical differences in the playing. Additionally, a third verse is included that is not in the LP version. "Footstompin' Music" became a staple at Grand Funk Railroad's concerts, having been recorded at the Survival sessions but not included on the original release.

International superstars Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón give inspired performances in Massenet's passionate opera, Manon. Netrebko gives full range to her abilities as a singer and actress in portraying innocence, lust, greed and, above all, beauty. It is Netrebko's mesmerizing performance which makes Villazón's youthful passion and ultimate despair even more authentic and heart-breaking. The setting in this production has been updated to the 1950s and the entire opera takes place as if Manon were the star of her own film. Indeed, Netrebko transforms her character from the innocence of Audrey Hepburn through the voluptuousness of Marilyn Monroe into the tragedy of Ingrid Bergman.

With a delivery that makes John Martyn sound like a Shakespearian voice coach, the one-time hero of the early Harvest days returns with a small band (Steeleye Span's Rick Kemp and Lindisfarne's Ray Laidlaw) and his best album in years. Indeed, the old obsessions (loneliness, love, drinking, injustice) have not been explored this convincingly since 1970's Fully Qualified Survivor. It Ain't So is an understated grumble of a song, feeding off an insistent minor riff; The North Will Rise unexpectedly introduces northern dissaffection to a reggae beat; while Hard Times has a riff and solo that recall Chapman's ex-guitarist, Mick Ronson. If anything, the ballads hit even harder, particularly Drinking Alone and the title track, where humanity and old-fashioned canniness produce a song to break hearts old and young.

A legend in her homeland of Ireland, gold-selling, multi-award winning artist Mary Black has long held the attention of the followers of Irish music as one of the finest female vocalists in the world. Mary Black's distinguished career has spanned over 25 years from her early days in dublin folk clubs through ever-escalating success with seven platinum solo albums in her homeland and strong sales abroad. Needless to say Mary Black is a seminal figure in Irish musical history and one of the artists responsible for it's relatively recent blossoming on a global level. In celebration of mary reaching a quarter of a century as a solo artist, this special compilation album contains 25 tracks spanning those 25 years, fully remastered and featuring 2 brand new songs.

For the first time ever, on the occasion of the group's 50th anniversary of their first hit, every single from Martha Reeves & the Vandellas is now in one package-the 3-CD box set 50th Anniversary: The Singles Collection 1962-1972, featuring all A- and B- sides, and much, much more. Featured among the set's 82 tracks are the group's 10 top ten Pop and R&B hits, including the everlasting "Come And Get These Memories," "Dancing In The Street," "Heat Wave" and "Nowhere To Run"; also included are the Vandellas' Spanish language versions of "I'm Ready For Love" and "Jimmy Mack." Martha Reeves first arrived at Motown to audition; she ended up becoming the company's first A&R secretary, and then a star, when she filled in to sing at a session and brought her background singers along. Along with the Miracles and the Marvelettes, she and the Vandellas were Motown trailblazers, who helped develop what was to soon become the world-famous "Motown Sound."

This greatest-hits collection by tenor Plácido Domingo follows on a similar 50 Greatest Tracks release devoted to his Three Tenors comrade Luciano Pavarotti, which was commercially well received and seems to have done what it set out to do. Let it be known that the way to understand opera is to go and see one rather than picking and choosing from among the catalog of even the greatest singers, company in which Domingo inarguably resides. That said, Deutsche Grammophon has assembled a highly listenable group of Domingo tracks that gives casual listeners an idea of the range of his talent, a range that was probably greater than that of the other two of the Three Tenors.

David Paton first came to be noticed as the lead singer and writer in Pilot writing No.1 hit songs including Magic and January. He then went on to collaborate with various major artists such as Kate Bush, The Alan Parsons Project and Paul McCartney, he has also spent a good number of years touring the world and recording as bass guitarist with Elton John. 2019 brought us the long anticipated release of the new album by David Paton of Pilot and The Alan Parsons Project fame. The Traveller: Another Pilot Project is David’s follow-up to 2014’s A PILOT PROJECT. The album showcases David as a singer, musician, and producer, as David reimagines 11 classic tunes from The Alan Parsons Project.

Joo Yeon Sir writes in the booklet to her solo recital album ‘Solitude’, ‘Solitude was the state I found myself in along with the rest of the world in 2020. Concerts were suddenly postponed… and I was left eerily by myself at home’. When, the following year, and the time had come to record the album, Lockdown was reinstated.

collectif9, well-known for its innovative programming and its unique arrangements of the classical repertory, here tackles the music of Debussy, following a first recording devoted to Mahler (ALPHA770). With Clair de lune , La Mer and Des pas sur la neige , the Montreal collective invites us into a sumptuous theatre of shadows and waves: ‘Could we, as nine string players, perform Claude Debussy’s La Mer and do it justice? In a musical style where timbre and colour are paramount, attempting to interpret this emblematic work seemed outrageous; but come to think of it, we like a challenge. This is certainly a reinterpretation. Being fewer in number allows us to otherwise reveal a rich rhythmic interplay already present in the work while shedding new light on the balance of voices and harmonies.’ A work by composer Luna Pearl Woolf completes the programme: Contact, ‘a sonic view into the underwater world of beluga whales in the St Lawrence Estuary’.

The scandalous composer Carlo Gesualdo, Principe di Venosa, was also an excellent lutenist extolled by his contemporaries. At the end of the sixteenth century he received the first two prototypes of the archlute from his colleague Alessandro Piccinini in Ferrara, one of which he kept. In the absence of music for the lute by this composer of genius, Bor Zuljan has imagined the sound world of the prince’s archlute: a kaleidoscope of fabulous and extreme sonorities on this extravagant instrument, from transcriptions of his vocal and instrumental music to the astonishing chromatic compositions of the composers he is thought to have encountered in the course of his turbulent life. Includes works by C. Gesualdo, A. Piccinini, J. H. Kapsberger, P. P. Melli, C. Saracini etc.

As part of EMI's Platinum Collection series, Deep Purple are featured on previously released tracks taken from the heavy metal band's stint with Warner Bros. Records in the late '60s through 2003, including the single-release versions, 1996 & 1997 remixes, and live versions. Among the 41 tracks are the original versions of "Smoke on the Water," "Woman from Tokyo," "Kentucky Woman." The collection ranges from "Hush" from 1968 through to "Sun Goes Down" from the final album they made. The box set comes housed in an embossed slipcase.

After so many benchmark recordings of the music of our time, the members of the Arditti Quartet were bound to give us one day a complete survey of the string quartets of Luciano Berio, the great Commendatore figure who has dominated Italian music since the 1950s. In point of fact, this programme takes in almost the whole career of the composer of Sequenze, from his Quartet no.1 of 1956, still under the influence of serialism, up to the Glosse of 1997 which are, as their title suggests, 'a collection of brief annotations, and at the same time a short dictionary of idiomatic sonic gestures'. In this fully mature work, Berio resolves in magisterial fashion the problem of the search for new instrumental solutions that is characteristic of the fascinating Sincronie (1963-64), an attempt to make the string quartet sound like 'a single homophonic instrument'. The final work in the programme, the Notturno (1993) presents an atmosphere of extreme expressive concentration, in which sound is born of silence (pppp quasi senza suono) and returns there. A whole series of technical and interpretative challenges that the Arditti meet with their usual sovereign mastery.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was, twice over and in two separate areas, one of the most renowned musical figures of the 20th century. Beginning at age seven, he was a celebrated performing prodigy, with a level of technical development and an understanding of music that awed such giants of the musical world as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who delighted in his prodigious talent. Greeted in such circles as a new Mozart, from his teens until his thirties Korngold was the author of a series of compositions – orchestral works, operas (most notably Die Tote Stadt), and chamber works – that were uniquely popular and among the most critically acclaimed of their era.

Designed in the spring of 2020, "Debussy in Resonance" aims to offer a space that nourishes the wonder and sensory imagination of the living while questioning the place of the human within the Whole. Faced with the dazzling extinction of certain species, the scarcity of water sources and the palpable malaise of modern societies, Joanna Goodale feels the urge to cultivate this feeling of carnal connection to Nature, which inspires gratitude, joy and the desire to take care of the living. Listening to the ecosystem, observing its elements and its cycles, revealed a source of wisdom rich in metaphors that resonate in the young Franco-Swiss pianist of Anglo-Turkish origin the deep meanings of existence.

Simon Preston established a career as a virtuoso organist and conductor of (mainly) religious choral music. He was a composer and an expert on organs as well, affecting the replacement of the traditional cathedral-style organ at Christ Church, Oxford, with a Rieger organ from Austria; he was consulted on the replacement of organs at the concert hall at St. John's, Smith Square and at Tonbridge School. Preston developed a broad repertory as both organist and conductor, taking in church (and other) music from the Baroque era but also reaching well into the 20th century.