Bassist Buster Williams had one of his few opportunities to lead a record session on this diverse set which has been reissued on CD (with an alternate take of "I Dream Too Much" added to the original program). Of the six selections, Williams has a duet apiece with Kenny Barron (who plays electric piano), pianist Jimmy Rowles and vibraphonist Roy Ayers ("My Funny Valentine"). Two other numbers feature the quartet of Williams, Ayers, Barron and drummer Billy Hart while the leader's original "Prism" has the quartet joined by singer Suzanne Klewan and percussionist Nobu Urushiyama. The music ranges from slightly commercial to introspective and hard swinging, and its variety (plus an opportunity to hear bassist Williams in the lead) are two good reasons for postbop jazz collectors to pick up this CD.

Paul McCandless is best known for his work as a founding member of Oregon, a pioneer in the genre that came to be labeled "new age." In fact, Oregon's music has always been much more than that oft-maligned label implies, for they combine jazz, classical and world musics into a blend that is at once unique and appealing. McCandless has worked the same terrain with his solo outings, and Heresay is one of his best. There is beauty here, there is polyrhythmic propulsion, there is first-class improvisation. The overall feel is one of optimism and light-heartedness, tempered with a compositional depth of emotion that conjures all sorts of visions in the listener's mind.

It’s an achievement when an artist can take a well-known work and interpret it freshly as if heard for the first time. This Marc Minkowski does with Handel’s Water Music by daring to challenge convention and expectation. Firstly Minkowski chooses to ignore modern musicology, which considers the work a continuous piece or a sequence of movements first in F major or D minor, then a mix of movements in D major and G major. Minkowski follows the earlier performance practice of presenting the Water Music as three suites, respectively grounded in F, G and D major which used to be called the Horn, Flute and Trumpet suites, designating the notable solo instruments. Minkowski also includes the two variant movements in F, HWV331, which are now thought to be a revision by Handel to create a freestanding concerto.

When Beethoven introduced himself to the Viennese public, playing his own First Piano Concerto in 1795, the other works in the concert were the first half of this oratorio and a symphony by the same composer, who in the following year was appointed Director of Music at the court of Prince Lobkowitz. Antonio Cartellieri, although his father was an Italian, was born in Danzig in 1772, which makes him a fairly close contemporary of Beethoven's. Abandoned at 13 by his parents after their divorce he must have had sufficient talent to attract aristocratic patronage, which enabled him to study in Vienna with Salieri and Albrechtsberger. He died, however, at 35, and until now not even scholars researching Beethoven's early career seem to have taken any interest in him.

The partnership of Serkin and Abbado in Mozart is a fascinating one. They are such different musical personalities, yet they work remarkably well together, so that each performance becomes an artistic amalgam of two quite different artistic approaches. Abbado matches a natural spontaneous warmth (listen to the beguiling way the orchestra shapes the secondary theme in the first movement of the A major Concerto) with the utmost refinement of detail; whereas Serkin, patrician, authoritative, strong, is more selfconsciously expressive when he deviates from a strictly rhythmic presentation of the melodic line in the same movement.

The Ensemble Pygmalion directed by Raphaël Pichon commences its collaboration with Harmonia Mundi with this new recording of J.S. Bach’s lost music to the Köthener Trauermusik (Cöthen funeral music), BWV 244a. Founded in 2006 at the European Bach Festival, Ensemble Pygmalion is a combination of choir and orchestra - all young performers with experience of authentic instruments and period-informed performance. Its repertoire concentrates primarily on Johann Sebastian Bach and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Though Puccini represents the late-Romantic apex of the Italian operatic tradition, his songs are much less well known and, in their pared simplicity and emotional restraint, could hardly be more different from his stage works. The nineteen complete songs for soprano (two in duet with a mezzo) and piano cover themes typical of lyric poetry including life, death, personal resolution, love, nature, home and religious faith. There are also rare salon pieces and examples of Puccini’s secular and sacred juvenilia, written between 1875 and 1880.

The accomplishments of the virginalists, that school of English keyboard composers who flourished in the late Tudor and early Stuart eras, are documented in even the most succinct music history books. This recording proposes an overview of non-liturgical English keyboard music from about 1525 to 1650, written for an instrument then called the virginals. Because of its slower mechanism and rustic timbre, the "virginals" is used here for playing the earlier repertoire and for variations on folk tunes, whereas the harpsichord is reserved for the more extended virtuoso pieces. Harpsichordist and scholar Rachelle Taylor has given concerts and lectures in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Taiwan, and has been featured in broadcast concerts on the French and English services of the CBC.

Most of Tallis’s keyboard works are contained in the Mulliner Book, a 133-folio manuscript dating from the middle of the sixteenth century in which is found a great variety of liturgical organ pieces, dances, and arrangements of vocal and instrumental works by composers of the generation that preceded the great flowering of virginal music spearheaded by William Byrd. In contrast, a handful of pieces dating from a later period which might have been composed for performance in the Elizabethan Chapel Royal show a completely different complexion. They include two treatments of the plainchant Felix namque (the Sarum offertory Felix namque es, sacra virgo Maria) dated 1562 and 1564 in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, whose virtuoso manner is unparalleled in any other European keyboard culture of that period.