20 Moments

Robert Plant's follow-up to Pictures at Eleven implements much of his debut's style and vocal meandering into a new and more exciting bunch of songs. The mysteriousness of "Big Log," the album's first single, reached the Top 20 in the United States and in the U.K., while "In the Mood" is The Principle of Moments' finest offering, proving that Plant could roam freely with his voice and still have it work effectively…

A flourish of new recordings of Schubert's last three piano sonatas has brought interpretations as individualistic as those available for the Beethoven sonatas, which is all to the good. This one, by the rather cherubic young German pianist Martin Helmchen, offers a fine example of creative rethinking of the work. Helmchen gives the music a Beethovenian trajectory. His reading of the opening Allegro of the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959, is initially quite odd – tentative, and a little tense – with the notes of the opening figure punched out and kept quite separate. The lyricism, usually brought to the fore here, is present only in Helmchen's gentle arpeggios.