Cheryl Strauss Einchon

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.

While this soundtrack is arguably most notable for introducing Middle America to Blondie, there is also some interesting incidental music written by legendary producer Giorgio Moroder and performed by Harold Faltermeyer and Keith Forsey – the latter of which may be familiar to some as percussionist for the German prog/art rock collective Amon Düül. There is likewise a vocal contribution from actress/vocalist Cheryl Barnes on "Love and Passion." The album's pervading heavily manufactured and synthetically generated atmosphere is convincing in its aural depiction of the shallow decadence portrayed on the screen. It took almost two decades before American Gigolo was issued on CD in North America. The primary impetus for the release was the "extended version" of Blondie's "Call Me," which was unavailable on any Blondie album and was too long – at over eight minutes – to fit onto a single. The song was co-composed by Debbie Harry and Moroder specifically for this project, becoming the second chart-topper for the band, ultimately staying at number one for six weeks in March of 1980.

Cheryl Bentyne's The Gershwin Songbook is among the best vocal albums of 2010. A member of The Manhattan Transfer since 1979, she frequently strikes out on her own to record, and has released eight albums in the past two decades. Perfecting her talent in vocalese with The Manhattan Transfer, Bentyne performs jazz choruses with a pitch-perfect soprano in the tradition of Annie Ross, by way of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. In this set of 15 Gershwin classics, she gets many opportunities to show her vocal dexterity; excelling in all contexts, swinging for sure, and sensitive to every nuance of the lyrics.