Afterbach Matinee

Mark Knopfler's second solo album might as well be called Dire Straits' eighth studio album, though Knopfler abandoned the group name back in 1996, dispensing with hefty sales in the process. There was never much doubt that the fame and lifestyle coincident with platinum sales made him uncomfortable, and discontinuing the Dire Straits billing was a means of walking away from all that. It also allowed him to indulge his love for various musical genres more, and that process continues on Sailing to Philadelphia…

A great debut makes an impression that remains in your memory for a lifetime. But how often do you hear two amazing debuts in one performance? That’s what happened more than forty years ago when Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli made simultaneous Met debuts in Il Trovatore before a delirious public. A week later, the February 4, 1961, Saturday matinee Trovatore was broadcast live on the Texaco-Metropolitan Opera radio network. New York had been hit by a major snowstorm, but the house was packed with an enthusiastic audience, alerted by the reviews to the sensational new singers.

(…) Les Chants de Nectaire is a perfect example of Koechlin's love of monody and of his comprehensive understanding of the possibilities of the flute. The range of the pieces is deceptively wide - from quiet, almost becalmed meditations to furious, abandoned dances in which the metre is ever changing and sometimes non-existent, while the melodies move from modality and diatonic purity to complex chromaticism, to create a flickering patchwork of moods. The technical demands on the player are enormous (not surprisingly this is the first ever recording of the complete cycle) but Pierre-Yves Artaud is one of the world's greatest flautists, and lavishes all his artistry on these haunting miniatures. - Andrew Clements, The Guardian

For his entire life, Reynaldo Hahn was labeled as a composer of salon music, a lightweight, whose compositions were written to satisfy the academic tastes of social circles in the Belle Époque and during the period between the two wars. Luckily however, in recent years, a handful of performers and publishers have allowed us to discover the incredible diversity of his eclectic and enchanting work. While not widely known, his piano music is in fact one of the most original aspects of his talent. The outstanding recordings presented in this boxed set of four CDs should help in banishing those long held prejudices.

Pin Ups fits into David Bowie's output roughly where Moondog Matinee (which, strangely enough, appeared the very same month) did into the Band's output, which is to say that it didn't seem to fit in at all. Just as a lot of fans of Levon Helm et al. couldn't figure where a bunch of rock & roll and R&B covers fit alongside their output of original songs, so Bowie's fans – after enjoying a string of fiercely original LPs going back to 1970's The Man Who Sold the World – weren't able to make too much out of Pin Ups' new recordings of a brace of '60s British hits…

Beginning in the early 1970’s and continuing until 1980, this relatively unknown band from Houston managed to record a stunning collection of songs that are the musical expression of the word Chameleon…