Tasmin Little's 2013 release on Chandos is an exploration of lush and lyrical music for violin and orchestra, composed by the leading British composers of the early 20th century, and it is an album of remarkable depth and beauty. Opening the program is the Concerto for violin & orchestra by E.J. Moeran, which sets the mood for the disc with its long-breathed, melancholy lines and pastoral atmosphere. While this is a technically challenging work that shows Little to her best advantage as a virtuoso, listeners may come away from the piece recalling its sweet ambience more than its flashiness. The same could also be said for Frederick Delius' Légende, Gustav Holst's A Song of the Night, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, all three of which provide tests for the violinist's skills, yet are filled with such gorgeous music that listeners may only remember the general opulence of the scores. Also included are premiere recordings of Roger Turner's arrangements of Edward Elgar's Chanson de matin, Chanson de nuit, and Salut d'amour, which in orchestration, mood, and style fit the rest of the album nicely.

Allan Taylor is one of England's most-respected singer/songwriters. His songs have been covered by artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Don Williams, Frankie Miller, Fairport Convention, Dick Gaughan, the McCalmans, the Fureys, the Clancy Brothers, and De Dannan. Folk Roots praised him for his "ability to crystallize a mood and evoke an era with the ease of a computer memory access, crafting perfect songs with dramatic changes in the spirit of Brecht, Bikel, and Brel." The Oxford Book of Traditional Verse felt as strongly, writing that Taylor was "one of the most literate and sensitive of contemporary songwriters in terms of words and music and one who is capable of exploring more complex subjects than most of his contemporaries."

Andrea Marcon and La Cetra Barockorchester & Vokalensemble Basel sparkle in this new release of Handel's forgotten masterpiece Parnasso in testa, recorded shortly before their hugely successful Netherlands premiere of the opera in November 2016.

Memphis Slim was immensely proud of this album, the first he ever made in his home state of Tennessee. It was recorded at Wayne Moss' Cinderella Studio, a converted garage in Madison, a suburb of Nashville perched between two lakes, in February of 1975. Backed by seven of the area's top session men led by harmonica ace Charlie McCoy, Slim sounds perfectly at home with pedal steel guitar and clavinet. This chapter in Memphis Slim's career combines elements of country and Southern rock with the funky big blues revue sound of the mid-'70s, as background female soul vocals were added later during follow-up production in Bogalusa, LA. The lead singer was Geraldine "Sister Gerry" Richard of Baton Rouge. What you encounter here is much different from Slim's earlier gutsy Arkansas/Mississippi/Chicago piano persona…

Head Hunters was a pivotal point in Herbie Hancock's career, bringing him into the vanguard of jazz fusion. Hancock had pushed avant-garde boundaries on his own albums and with Miles Davis, but he had never devoted himself to the groove as he did on Head Hunters. Drawing heavily from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown, Hancock developed deeply funky, even gritty, rhythms over which he soloed on electric synthesizers, bringing the instrument to the forefront in jazz. It had all of the sensibilities of jazz, particularly in the way it wound off into long improvisations, but its rhythms were firmly planted in funk, soul, and R&B, giving it a mass appeal that made it the biggest-selling jazz album of all time (a record which was later broken)…

For the first time in this series this is progressive jazz rock, doing without any vocals but featuring an alto saxophone and occasionally a transverse flute. When the precursors of Morpheus, the band Opossum, wanted to tie their members down to free jazz, half of the crew refused to obey, left the band and founded Morpheus in early 1975. Their only LP, "Rabenteuer", was released in an edition of 500 copies and is by now an expensive collectors’ item. For the CD, which was taken from the master tapes, the 20-minute "Morpheus jam" has been dug out as a bonus track. Particularly outstanding are the spacey sounds in the first quarter of "Abflug", so that this track was also selected for the CD on hand. The mishap that the LP is a bit too slow and thus a semitone too low has been put right on this CD.

RMI's Steve Dinsdale, Duncan Goddard, and Gary Houghton know how to coax all sorts of nuances from their machines, and they function as a live, interactive trio, with each member responding to the others' riffs and musical motifs. It doesn't hurt any, either, that Houghton has very impressive guitar chops, so when he eases into the mix with some blistering Stratocaster bursts, he rather convincingly updates (and improves upon) Edgar Froese's generic and rather predictable guitar flights on the seminal Tangerine Dream recordings. In a word, Radio Massacre International nail the vintage electronic music sound, but the band is simply more "nimble" than the first generation models, which greatly enhances the listening pleasure of the suitably attuned listener…if you're a musical novice unacquainted with RMI's sources, this music will serve as a stellar introduction to the form.

Did the world need to hear Gershwin played by a viol consort, with an occasional recorder tootling along? If so, then why not Purcell accompanied by a jazz piano? The idea of combining the two composers in one performance is an attractive one, and the mix of vocal and instrumental pieces by each composer here is intelligently grouped. Arranger and leader Jay Bernfeld offers several parallels. Both composers were, in the broadest sense, urban sensations and musical-theater composers with bigger things on their minds; both managed to complete one towering opera before dying young. He might have added more items to his list: the ground basses of Purcell's time are elaborated by their melody lines in a manner akin to, if not precisely comparable to, the structure of Gershwin's songs.

There is a tradition among Russian composers to write an elegiac trio in memory of a departed friend. It is Tchaikovsky who first introduced this tradition with his grandiose trio in A minor dedicated to Nikolay Rubinstein. Dmitry Shostakovich carried this tradition into the twentieth century with his Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, dedicated to the memory of his closest friend the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky. These are the two telling works performed here in their premiere recording by the Rachmaninoff Trio de Montréal

It has often been said that music is a universal language; it is not, though, universally understood as a mother tongue, it is only universally spoken thus. So one must always attempt to hear it like something new, not quite familiar with a tourist's perception. Let's travel, then, and imagine some interesting encounters, where a German Brahms would understand a French Saint-Saëns as much as a Russian Glière, where a Belgian Jongen would make himself understood to an Austrian Kreisler as much as to a British Elgar, and where a trombonist and a pianist would understand themselves mutually. The listener, then, will have the creative opportunity to impart these familiar and less familiar sounds with significance while surrendering to the sheer pleasure of their beauty.

Halevy's Noé is another one of those operas that is rather obscure, but doesn't deserve to be. One may criticise it for the story stretching slightly longer than it needed to be, and occasionally one can tell that it was left incomplete, and the music not having any memorable arias (similar problems with Clari), but the story itself is quite good, after all it is based on the biblical story of Noah and the music is beautiful, it is unmistakably Halevy but Bizet's (who was responsible for completing the opera) style does come through in the orchestration.