The contents of this album reflect the operatic music Mozart would have known as a teenager. One of the composers, Christoph Willibald Gluck, is known as a founder of the Classical style in opera; others, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, and Tommaso Traetta, are known mostly to specialists, at least in the operatic field. Listeners who have heard the spectacular arias of the late Baroque popularized by Renée Fleming and others will find the pieces here less virtuosic but more dramatically satisfying, as if the composers and librettists had engaged themselves anew with the ancient Greek stories they were retelling. One might object that annotator Denis Morrier gives short shift to the most important of the librettists, Pietro Metastasio, whose writings remained popular up to Beethoven's time.

The series of recordings of the Abbey of Maulbronn is prolific, and after a very good Messiah, we arrive now Solomon, another oratorio of Haendel. Solomon is a rather fixed work, a single scene, that of the famous judgment, presenting a little bit of "action", but the music, powerful and refined, is the most inspired Handel, and the virtuoso treatment of the choruses reveals a incomparable mastery.

If you love Vivaldi's FOUR SEASONS, you will eat this up. The new tempos (which may be more like the original) take this piece from its previous iterations as a formal, Baroquesque piece to a wild, rowdy interpretation of nature's four seasons I mean, the actual four seasons. Spring has never sounded more like spring (the speeded up tempo reveals myriad birdsongs), etc.

The "Baroque Favorites for Guitar" title of this CD implies that it might be a greatest-hits compilation or a collection of tunes aimed at newcomers to classical music, and the presence of the not-really-Albinoni Adagio among the contents reinforces this impression. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. It is the product of a long study on Isbin's part (of course, this isn't the kind of detail the marketing department is looking for!), study that has resulted in quite distinctive music making. The album includes mostly transcribed concertos, with a few solo works.

Cellist Jacqueline du Pré needs little introduction to most listeners. Whether as a result of being perhaps the most prominent female cellist in the last century, her meteoric rise to fame at a young age, the equally rapid decline of her career at the hands of multiple sclerosis, or simply the incredible passion with which she performed, du Pré possessed a singular capacity to make an impression on her audiences. She was single-handedly responsible for reviving the long-dormant Elgar concerto that was to become one of her trademark pieces.

The Dubnology compilation is a two-disc, 21-track collection of spacy late-'90s electronic dub, heavy on the bass, demonstrating that the music has become more techno-influenced and reliant on electronics and technology. Highlights include tracks by System7, Loop Guru, Zion Train, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Banco de Gaia; the booklet includes biographies and photos of all the artists.

This 1965 set by organist Bill Doggett's band is well-played and spirited but quite lightweight. The nine selections are mostly blues-oriented jams without any memorable melodies, stirring solos, or moments that lift the program above the routine. The rather brief results are pleasant and groovin' but rather predictable.