Brigitte Lahaie Jane Baker

Although baritonist Gerry Mulligan is listed as the leader of this date, vocalist Jane Duboc is really the main star. The Brazilian-oriented set consists of eight Mulligan originals (including "Tema Pra Jobim," which finds him switching to piano, and "Willow Tree") and three other numbers, with "Wave" being the only standard. Duboc sings well, although her voice never sticks in one's mind, and Mulligan has short solos and mostly sticks to the background; they are joined by a couple of Brazilian rhythm sections. Pleasant music that mostly stands out as a historical curiosity in Gerry Mulligan's discography.

Ivan Lins is one of the most treasured and recorded Brazilian composers in the world and a melodist with few equals. The winner of four Latin Grammy Awards, Lins has recorded nearly fifty albums since 1970; they contain countless songs, notably “Madalena” and “Começar de Novo” (To Begin Again), that have become standards in his country. “Love Dance,” cowritten with his longtime arranger, Gilson Peranzzetta, and lyricist Paul Williams, is Lins’s English-language classic. Its performers include Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Mark Murphy, Shirley Horn, Blossom Dearie, Carmen McRae, George Benson, Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand, and Quincy Jones, who helped maneuver Lins’s U.S. breakthrough in the early ‘80s.

Filmed in 1979, this delightful staging by Otto Schenk features outstanding singer-actresses Gwyneth Jones, Brigitte Fassbaender and Lucia Popp. Der Rosenkavalier is Richard Strauss’s most popular opera and the greatest comic opera since Mozart. Premiered just three years before the start of the First World War, the opera traces the artistic heritage of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in the days of Mozart, where the story is set, to the morbid distraction of the Viennese Art Nouveau.

Recorded at the Vienna State Opera house in 1989, this staging of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is one of the glories of live opera on film, deserving of eternal availability. The DVD picture has great clarity, despite the darkness of Hans Schavernoch’s set design. Other than the cliché of a huge statue head, toppled on its side, the set manages to be suitably representative of a decaying palace as well as an imposing, theatrical space, dominated by the mammoth body of the statue from which the head apparently dropped, draped with the ropes that seem to have enabled the decapitation. Sooner or later most of the characters cling to and twist around those ropes, an apt stage metaphor for the remorseless repercussions from the murder of Agammenon by his unfaithful wife Klytämnestra and her paramour, Aegisthus. Reinhard Heinrich’s costumes capture a distant era while sustaining a creepily modern look — part Goth, part homeless, part Spa-wear.

With their debut LP The Future Is Our Way Out the Chicago-based 5 piece share a body of work that spans genres and eras, merging the lavish romanticism of mid-century pop with the frenetic energy and spiky intensity of early-millennium indie, all centered on singer Wes Leavins’ hypnotically crooning vocal work. One listen and you'll fall in love with their charming, swooning and shimmering sound that gives nods to The Smiths, Roy Orbison and The Smoking Popes.