Clarion 2.2.2

Grammy award winning pianist and keyboard player Jim Beard has accumulated a staggering array of credits including composing for John McLaughlin and Michael Brecker, and performing on world tours with Wayne Shorter, Pat Metheny and Steely Dan. 'Show of Hands', is unique amongst his work, however - a captivating solo piano recording. As can be expected from Beard, the album does not pigeonhole itself into one style and features eight brand new creations, two full length songs and six short Haikus. Also included are solo versions of compositions featured on other recordings together with an eighteenth century society piece, a Wayne Shorter classic (Weather Report's "Face on the Barroom Floor") and a few standards.

Over half of this collector's four-CD box set is previously unissued studio, demo, rehearsal, or live recordings. Nothing is duplicated in this material originally recorded from 1961-1967. The Trashmen are an amazing summary of contradictions when looked at from afar. In pictures, even live ones, they are four clean-cut chaps in suits. Their nationwide 1963 hit "Bird," the 1965 version of which is included here, is a deliriously silly, primitively noisy, and utterly infectious gem. It's like playing a Black Sabbath album and showing pictures of the Bee Gees and trying to get someone to believe they are one and the same.

Régine Crespin Notwithstanding her great success in the German repertory, Régine Crespin was quintessentially a French artist. With an unmistakable sensuality betraying her origins in Mediterranean France, she was guided by an unfailing sense of elegance. Whether as Kundry, the Marschallin, Carmen, Didon, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, or Sieglinde, her large, lush voice was deployed with refined abandon. Her top register, powerful and soaring when it was working as the singer wished, sometimes emerged congested, as tones that began as clarion would cloud over and lose their cutting edge. As it became increasingly problematic, Crespin looked toward roles only equivocally soprano, where she could rely on the luxurious amplitude of her middle and lower registers. Her Carmen, presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975 after a period of vocal restudy and a loss of weight, was distinctive for its subtle danger and meticulous delivery of text and vocal line. Following studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Georges Jouatte and celebrated bass Paul Cabanel, Crespin made her debut in 1950 singing Elsa at Mulhouse. In August of that same year, she appeared for the first time at the Paris Opéra, the role once again being Elsa.

Philippe Pierlot and the Ricercar Consort's 2006 recording of Bach's Magnificat brings back the glory days of historically informed performances, those halcyon days in the 1980s when musicians, empowered by scholarship and energized by virtuosity, were recording the Baroque repertoire with the zeal of the newly converted. Though Pierlot and his musicians are of a younger generation, they bring a missionary fervor to the music, a program of Bach's Magnificat, BWV 243, and Missa Brevis, BWV 235, interspersed with two well-chosen organ works, the Fuga sopra il Magnificat, BWV 733, and the Präludium und Fuga, BWV 541.

This greatest-hits collection by tenor Plácido Domingo follows on a similar 50 Greatest Tracks release devoted to his Three Tenors comrade Luciano Pavarotti, which was commercially well received and seems to have done what it set out to do. Let it be known that the way to understand opera is to go and see one rather than picking and choosing from among the catalog of even the greatest singers, company in which Domingo inarguably resides. That said, Deutsche Grammophon has assembled a highly listenable group of Domingo tracks that gives casual listeners an idea of the range of his talent, a range that was probably greater than that of the other two of the Three Tenors.

Régine Crespin Notwithstanding her great success in the German repertory, Régine Crespin was quintessentially a French artist. With an unmistakable sensuality betraying her origins in Mediterranean France, she was guided by an unfailing sense of elegance. Whether as Kundry, the Marschallin, Carmen, Didon, Amelia in Un ballo in maschera, or Sieglinde, her large, lush voice was deployed with refined abandon. Her top register, powerful and soaring when it was working as the singer wished, sometimes emerged congested, as tones that began as clarion would cloud over and lose their cutting edge. As it became increasingly problematic, Crespin looked toward roles only equivocally soprano, where she could rely on the luxurious amplitude of her middle and lower registers. Her Carmen, presented at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975 after a period of vocal restudy and a loss of weight, was distinctive for its subtle danger and meticulous delivery of text and vocal line. Following studies at the Paris Conservatoire with Georges Jouatte and celebrated bass Paul Cabanel, Crespin made her debut in 1950 singing Elsa at Mulhouse. In August of that same year, she appeared for the first time at the Paris Opéra, the role once again being Elsa.

Richard Lambert, born in Bath in the English West Country in 1951, grew up with the sounds of organ and brass among his earliest musical experiences: he played cornet and trumpet as a boy and was soon taking organ lessons in Bath Abbey. His own compositions for brass and organ – many of them written to mark special occasions in the lives of friends and acquaintances – range in mood from the tender and intimate to the bold and heraldic, in a language downstream from Walton and Poulenc.