Biochemistry Van Holde, Ahern Biochemistry Mathews 1999

This CD is probably unique. The oboe was relegated in the romantic age as the clarinet gained favour. So there are few chamber works for oboe from this period, and those that exist are rarely recorded. But to have several of these pieces on one disc and played so well on period instruments makes this a real treat. The instruments are an 1850 Triebert oboe and Erard pianoforte. These are not so different technically from their modern counterparts, but in these musicians' hands they deliver a warm, distinctive sound that would be hard to emulate with modern instruments.

This was the first set of the Nine to be planned, recorded and sold as an integral cycle. It was also a set that had been extremely carefully positioned from the interpretative point of view. Where Karajan's 1950s Philharmonia cycle had elements in it that owed a certain amount to the old German school of Beethoven interpretation, the new-found virtuosity of the Berliners allowed him to approach more nearly the fierce beauty and lean-toned fiery m anner of Toscanini's Beethoven style as Karajan had first encountered it in its halcyon age in the mid-1930s.

Nach dieser Produktion könnte man durchaus auf den Gedanken kommen, die Oper müsse eigentlich Teseo in Creta heissen, so beherrschend und überlegen gestaltet Wilke te Brummelstroete die Partie des Teseo! Neben ihrer Fähigkeit, sich dem Stil von Händels Musik anzupassen kommt ihre ungeheure Bühnenpräsenz und Ausdruckskraft, die sie zur alles beherrschenden Figur der Oper werden liess.

By 1997, Crosby, Stills & Nash were without a label thanks to a drastic artistic slump, but they began working on a new album, paying for studio time out of their own pockets. Neil Young expressed interest in the tapes, and suddenly, a new CSNY album was in the works. Even though Young's continual tinkering pushed its release back by months, Looking Forward still feels rushed and half-finished. It's immediately apparent that the record began as a self-financed project; it sounds weirdly muted, as if all the levels weren't set accurately; similarly, it's possible to hear sometimes awkward overdubs added to basically completed tracks. While they may have named the album Looking Forward, CSNY are alternately nostalgic and haunted by the past, which colors their attempts to look toward the future. All four of Young's songs fit squarely within the Harvest tradition, as he tries to balance his restless nature with growing old…

Botstein clearly feels great conviction for this music and this comes across both in performance and in the booklet text, part of which he contributed. These are eloquent performances directed by a man who clearly sees Hartmann as a natural partner to Shostakovich.

His own Lutheranism notwithstanding, Handel wrote some remarkable music for the Catholic liturgy while in Rome as a young man. In our era they've been performed in the concert hall–large-scale, multi-movement pieces such as the robust Dixit Dominus and the gracious Nisi Dominus in particular coming across as miniature oratorios. But they were, in fact, church music–as Andrew Parrott reminds us with this speculative reconstruction of a lavish 1707 Vespers service for which the young Handel provided music. The performance by Parrott and his Taverner groups is exhilarating. The Dixit Dominus in particular packs a real wallop.

The most ambitious work by 20th-century French master Olivier Messiaen, Saint Francis is also his most all-embracing. He spent nearly a decade creating the opera, which not only encapsulates the composer's abiding Catholic faith but draws on a lifetime of musical discovery and brings together the elements of Messiaen's far-ranging, rich vocabulary: birdsong and nature as a source for music, Eastern modes, complex rhythms derived from ancient Greek poetry and Hindu talas, plainsong, and percussive gamelan-like sonorities, to list a few of the most salient. Messiaen chose Francis for operatic representation as the saint "most like Christ" and wrote his own libretto, using the gentle poetry of the Fioretti.