1996

Elvis Costello embarked on a small, intimate tour with his longtime pianist Steve Nieve in the spring of 1996 to promote All This Useless Beauty. All of the shows from the five-date tour were recorded, and highlights from each show were issued on a series of promotional EPs that were later released commercially as the box set Costello & Nieve. Stripped down to their basics, the songs from All This Useless Beauty sit elegantly next to Costello classics, as well as several lesser-known gems from his rich back catalog. The performances are all understatedly passionate, and rank among the best that Costello has given, making Costello & Nieve five discs that any hardcore fan will treasure.

Broken China is a progressive rock solo album by Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright. It was his second and final solo album. The album is a four-part concept album based on Wright's then-wife Mildred's battle with depression, and is very much like a classic Pink Floyd concept album in its structure and overall feel. Two songs, "Reaching for the Rail" and "Breakthrough" feature Sinéad O'Connor on lead vocals, with Wright singing elsewhere. The album was recorded in Wright's personal studio in France. Broken China was only Wright's second solo record after 1978's Wet Dream and the last to be released before his death in September 2008. Wright asked fellow Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour to perform on the album, and Gilmour agreed to play on "Breakthrough." However, the approach for the song was changed later on, and Gilmour's performance was not used on the finished release.

On 2 March 1714, barely three weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday, the Weimar court organist Johann Sebastian Bach received "the title of Concertmaster." Shortly before he had turned down an important organist's position in Halle; the promotion to concertmaster, granted "at his most humble request," clearly represented a quid pro quo on the part of his employer, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. As the principal condition of his new post Bach had the obligation "to perform new pieces every month"—in today's parlance, to produce a new cantata on a monthly basis.

Carl Heinrich Graun was court composer to Frederick the Great of Prussia, and this opera was chosen to open the new opera house in Berlin in 1742. It was a great success, but Handel's opera on the same subject had appeared less than two decades before, and had anyone been familiar with that one, Graun's might have come as a disappointment. Handel gets under his characters' skins–Cleopatra's eight arias tell us everything we have to know about her, for instance–while Graun (merely) offers some beautiful, well-orchestrated, at-times exciting music. Any composer would have been proud to compose Cesare's heart-stoppingly vengeful last-act aria "Voglio strage", and any Read more mezzo (or castrato or countertenor) would be happy to sing it. Here, Iris Vermillion is spectacular, and elsewhere in the opera she's as heroic, romantic, and colorful as our hero ought to be.

This reading shows the gentleness of the work perfectly…The essence of the score that Herreweghe brings out so well is Mendelssohn's flawless counterpoint, not just the fugal choruses but between orchestra and choir or woodwind and strings. The harmonic richness leaps out from the opening of the overture, with its lush orchestration of the chorale Wachet auf. It makes so much sense on a period orchestra.

Michael Haydn is understandably overshadowed by his famous older sibling, as Salieri and Leopold Mozart are by Wolfgang Amadeus. In all three cases, these Chandos recordings go a long way towards restoring the balance. With just a handful of recordings of his music, the disc or download of Michael Haydn’s music becomes mandatory for a real appreciation of Mozart’s relation to his contemporaries, especially as one of Michael Haydn’s symphonies was long attributed to Mozart as his No.37 – he actually wrote only the slow introduction.

Catalonia isn’t renowned for its contribution to the Classical symphony, so it comes as something of a surprise to find nearly twenty works of such craftsmanship by Carlos Baguer, organist of Barcelona Cathedral in the late 18th century. In their structure, use of colour and in certain melodic details, these works owe much to Haydn, though Baguer tends to repeat, rather than develop, his material. Matthias Bamert is perhaps better known as a conductor of Romantic and contemporary music, but here he shows himself to be a sympathetic director of the classical repertoire, producing excellent results from the London Mozart Players.

Glazunov, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, received encouragement also from Belyayev, an influential patron and publisher whose activities succeeded and largely replaced the earlier efforts of Balakirev to inspire the creation of national Russian music. Glazunov joined the teaching staff of the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1899 and after the student protests and turmoil of 1905 was elected director, a position he retained until 1930 (although from 1928 he remained abroad, chiefly in Paris, where he died in 1936). His music represents a synthesis between the Russian and the so-called German—the technical assurance introduced by the Rubinstein brothers in the Conservatories of St Petersburg and of Moscow in the middle of the century.

The works of the 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay are often considered to be where medieval music ends and Renaissance music begins. Yet Dufay sounds quite different from later, better-known Renaissance composers such as Palestrina, Victoria, and Josquin: Dufay's music is less densely scored, with more stratified voice ranges, very complex rhythms, and a somewhat neutral emotional affect. Pomerium, a New York-based choir with extensive experience in Dufay, presents here one of the composer's largest works: a setting of both the ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) and the propers (texts specific to the occasion) of the Mass for the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. Pomerium's polished performance makes this a fine addition to the Dufay discography.