Anne+ 2021

The Who‘s 1967 album The Who Sell Out will be reissued as a seven-disc super deluxe edition box set in April. The album was originally planned by Pete Townshend and the band’s managers (Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp) as a loose concept album with jingles and commercials linking the songs. This approach was partly because the record label were demanding a new record and Townshend felt as if he didn’t have enough songs!

Anne-Marie’s second studio album, ‘Therapy’, is the official follow-up to her multi-platinum and four million-selling 2018 debut, ‘Speak Your Mind’ [the UK’s biggest-selling debut release of that year]. An artist whose everywoman candour and knock-you-down vocal range has reverberated across the globe, ‘Therapy’ is a collection of songs that embody Anne-Marie’s characterful artistry, self-effacing attitude and beautiful honesty; attributes that have not only catapulted Essex-born Anne-Marie to platinum status in the UK to the USA and everywhere in-between, but ones that have seen her reign supreme a fearless Gen Z role model. It features guest appearances by KSI, Digital Farm Animals, Little Mix, Niall Horan, Nathan Dawe, MoStack, and Rudimental. The album was supported by four singles: "Don't Play", "Way Too Long", "Our Song", and "Kiss My (Uh-Oh)", while "Beautiful" was released as the sole promotional single off the album on 12 July 2021. The album received generally positive reviews from music critics and was also a commercial success.

The first two volumes of Anne-Marie McDermott's Mozart piano concerto cycle with the Odense Symfoniorkester have received a superb critical reception. Volume 3 of the series hears the great American pianist in Mozart's final piano concerto, K. 595, paired with Mozart's sparkling, heartbreaking E-flat concerto, K. 449. The Odense Symfoniorkester is led by the German conductor, Sebastian Lang-Lessing.

This album ranges widely over Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan’s substantial output of sacred music and gathers together a few pieces that haven’t made it into the studio, such as the lovely St Anne’s Mass. Many of the pieces have personal significance, including works written for the weddings of family members and a Requiem Mass for his father. The largest here, The Culham Motets—written for the consecration of a chapel—is ambitious music, full of colour, and MacMillan strikes the perfect note. The smaller works are beautifully done and Cappella Nova’s singing, captured gloriously by producer/engineer Philip Hobbs, is breathtaking.