The Visitor is the third studio album by the British progressive band Arena, released in 1998. One of prog's great records of the 90's and beyond. With The Visitor Arena became a 'real' band, not just a Clive Nolan (Pendragon) project with ex original Marillion drummer Mick Pointer. Now with their best ever line up that included John Mitchel on guitar, John Jowitt (IQ, Jadis) on bass and vocalist Paul Wrightson they produced one of prog's masterpieces of all time. This concept album about a man facing a near death experience is really thrilling, both musically and lyrically.

While there has been an enormous number of Slade collections over the years, Shout Factory's 2004 release Get Yer Boots On: The Best of Slade is the first comprehensive U.S. compilation, containing both their '70s peak and their early-'80s comeback. If the track listing looks vaguely familiar to Slade-heads, that's because it does share numerous similarities to the 1994 British collection Wall of Hits, which also covered the band's entire career, extending it to their brief return to the U.K. charts in the early '90s.

Riccardo Muti takes time out here to present some of the lesser known, rarely heard orchestral scores of his fellow countrymen, and a superbly played, enjoyable concert it is too. Proceedings commence with a fine and spirited performance of Alfredo Casella's divertimento Paganiniana—not a great piece by any means but a work possessing plenty of charm and humour nevertheless; the outer movements are a bit of a romp (very opera buffa) and must have been as much fun to write as they clearly are for the La Scala Philharmonic to play.

Nobody knows why Johann Sebastian Bach composed his six suites for solo cello. Nor does anybody know how it came about that the suites were soon afterwards consigned to oblivion and more than a century before a 13-year-old Spanish musical prodigy discovered a worn copy of the score in a second-hand bookstore store in Barcelona. For the next 11 years Pablo Casals practiced them every day. Finally, in 1936, he entered London’s Abbey Road studios to record the second and third suites for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, Bach’s cello suites have become a rite of passage for all aspiring cellists.