Urban Flamingo features James with his Michigan-based quintet of bassist Al Turner, drummer Ron Otis, guitarist Perry Hughes and saxophonist David McMurray. The disc opens with "Choose Me," which has James jamming over the chord changes of a funky blues. While the primarily electric instrumentation and McMurray's often syrupy saxophone playing will undoubtedly turn off mainstream-minded listeners, they will appeal to those who are looking for a pop or R&B-oriented jazz sound.

Whilst in The Faces, Rod Stewart pursued a solo career, which paid dividends in 1971 when he was propelled to the top of the UK charts with Maggie May and later You Wear It Well, both are included here. Enjoy!

Surprisingly this seems to be the only disc coupling what might reasonably be counted the two greatest romantic Russian violin concertos: if Vengerov's reading of the Tchaikovsky emerges clearly as a leading contender among many superb versions, in the Glazunov he gives a warhorse concerto extra dimensions, turning it from a display piece into a work of far wider-ranging emotions. This Tchaikovsky immediately establishes itself as a big performance, not through close placing of the soloist — the balance is forward though not excessively so — but both in the manner and in the range of dynamic of the playing.

Mycology: An Anthology collects highlights from the Allman Brothers' '90s work for Epic Records. Although these latter-day recordings didn't quite reach the heights of the group's '70s heyday, they were surprisingly strong and Mycology is the best way for the curious fan to discover that. By rounding up the best moments from Seven Turns, Shades of Two Worlds, An Evening with the Allman Brothers Band and Where It All Begins, the collection offers a good distillation of an underrated portion of the group's career, thereby making it of equal interest to casual and hardcore fans alike.

An all-too-irresistible confection of well-known and much-loved pop and glam allsorts can’t disguise Sweet’s authentic hard rock centre. Don’t turn it down. In this brand new blockbuster collection, Andy, Brian, Steve and Mick take you through some hellraising action and blitz you into happy submission. Are you ready? Includes detailed sleevenotes in an 8-page booklet.

The Ninth makes for a strong conclusion to the set, but it perhaps lacks the grandeur of more traditional performances. It's powerful, meticulously prepared, and deeply committed, but it doesn't belong in the mighty Klemperer-Karajan dynasty. That will be a plus point to some, and a minus point to others. The young-sounding soloists are excellent as a quartet, especially the soprano, but aren't ideal in their solo numbers: the tenor sounds breathless and lightweight at Zinman's pace, and the bass is hardly commanding enough at his entry to be credible as a silencer of the orchestra's din. The chorus is excellent.

Handel’s Ottone was one of the most popular operas of the composer’s career, with 34 known performances during his lifetime, beaten only by the 53 performances of Rinaldo. The premiere run in 1723 featured superstar Italian soloists including Senesino and Cuzzoni, and coincided with (and was perhaps the cause of) the height of London’s opera madness, with tickets changing hands for increasingly high prices on the black market. This recording of the 1723 version (Handel adapted the opera in later years for different singers) features James Bowman at the peak of his powers in the title role.

Les Ambassadeurs launch a series of recordings devoted to the repertory of the Dresdner Hofkapelle at the time of Bach, with the aim of rediscovering the splendid sound of an ensemble then regarded as the orchestral ideal. The ties of friendship between Johann Georg Pisendel – who led the orchestra – and Antonio Vivaldi held firm for life. Between their first meeting in Venice in 1716 and the death of the Prete Rosso in 1741, Pisendel continually enriched his collection of Vivaldi concertos, a certain number of which were manifestly tailor-made for his outstanding technique and equally exceptional delicacy of expression. This explains why Dresden holds so many Vivaldian treasures, sometimes autograph, sometimes copied in Pisendel’s own hand.

Their score for Roman Polanski's Macbeth film required the group to work in a somewhat more constricted format. So instead of lengthy hypnotic drones, this album's split into 16 separate pieces, some of them quite short. It's consequently not as reflective of their highest ambitions as the Third Ear Band album, and loses a bit when placed out of context from the Shakespeare classic. It still works reasonably effectively on its own, conjuring appopriately ominous Elizabethean moods, with the surprise addition of (uncredited) female vocals on one track.