After the runaway success of her charming, folksy first album Quelqu'un M'a Dit, Carla Bruni's sophomore effort takes a more difficult route and sees her setting canonical works by such poets as Yeats and Emily Dickinson to music, often calamitously. W.H. Auden's "At Last the Secret Is Out" offers a case in point. Set to a brisk Jack Johnson-style swinging guitar, the poem becomes stripped of all its meaning: no one word is allowed to stand out, as each line is madly shoehorned into a sensible rhythm, and the wistful, yearning tone of the poem gets lost in the breezy melody of the song. Therein lies the problem. Bruni's blues guitar template is too rigid to allow these words to breathe.

As compilations go, Universal's two-CD Greatest Hits and More might be the best sampling of Engelbert Humperdinck's work that has yet appeared. All of his best-loved hits are here (including "Release Me," "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize," "Quando Quando Quando," and "There Goes My Everything"), but there are also a few extra tidbits that should keep even longtime fans happy with the program – most notably, four brand new songs.

With this CD, Jonathan Dunford completes his project to record all of the known unpublished pièces de viole of Marin Marais. They survive uniquely, without concordances, in Marais’s own hand in a manuscript, found in the National Library of Scotland, that belonged to a young Scottish contemporary. Although the manuscript provides only the viol part, Dunford’s colleagues happily improvise continuo parts on a second viol, a theorbo or a Baroque guitar and a harpsichord – inspired, they say, by jazz.

It must have been nearly Christmas as a plethora of CDs were released to capture the market in harmonic, angelic, easy on the ears singing and here was the second offering from the teenage quartet of young ladies known as All Angels. With an almost identical sleeve design as the previous years' All Angels album, the beautiful, angelic looking girls dressed in all white against a white background, to make them all appear like, well, angels.

The ancient shamanistic musical traditions of the Sami of northern Scandinavia are given a modern twist by vocalist and drummer Mari Boine (Persen). Although her highly rhythmic songs are rooted in the wordless, yodeling-like vocal style of yoik (or joik), Boine's arrangements incorporate influences of jazz, rock, and other ethnic elements.