127 Weeks

Stand Up was the first album where Anderson controlled the music and lyrics, resulting in a group of diverse songs that ranged from the swirling blues of “A New Day Yesterday” and the mandolin-fueled rave-up of “Fat Man,” to the group’s spirited re-working of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Bouree in E Minor.” In a recent interview, Anderson picked Stand Up as his favorite Jethro Tull album, “because that was my first album of first really original music. It has a special place in my heart.” The first disc features Steven Wilson’s new stereo mixes of the original album, along with a number of rare recordings, including an unreleased version of “Bouree.” Other highlights include four songs recorded at the BBC, plus stereo single mixes for “Living In The Past” and “Driving Song”…

On a Storyteller's Night, Magnum's sixth album originally released in the U.K. in May 1985, wasn't the band's best-selling LP; it peaked at number 24 in seven weeks, not as good a showing as the third album, 1982's Chase the Dragon (number 17), much less the Top Ten hits Wings of Heaven (1988, number five) or Goodnight L.A. (1990, number nine). Whether it is Magnum's best album is a matter of opinion, though, according to Dave Ling of Classic Rock magazine, whose 2004 interview with guitarist Tony Clarkin is reprinted as part of this 25th anniversary deluxe-edition reissue, "fans still rate Storyteller as Magnum's masterwork."…

The final chords of the revolutionary world premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Kärntnertortheater in Vienna on May 7, 1824 had hardly faded away (one of the many enthusiastic listeners in the hall was the 27-year-old Franz Schubert!) when the star composer got straight to work on a new string quartet; the work, following his latest string quartet, Op. 45 which was composed 14 years earlier, was commissioned by Prince Nikolaus Galitzin and became the quartet in E-flat major, Op. 127. In the same year, and interestingly written in immediate spatial and temporal proximity to the studio in which Beethoven was just about to open the doors to musical modernism, Schubert, after having spent several weeks in the Vienna general hospital for treatment of his suspected syphilis desease, composed his String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, D. 804, the so-called Rosamunde Quartet.