Earl Drake 03 Operation Fireball

The gestation of this project lasted two years. Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake finally concentrated their research on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment. Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré’s Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell’s Sleep, Adam, sleep with its references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a tempter who leads man astray, as in Brahms’s Salamander, Wolf’s Die Bekehrte or Ravel’s Air du Feu. In Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann conjures up the image of Syria’s rose-covered plains. Bernstein also transports us to the desert with Silhouette. John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Paradise Lost was the inspiration for Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten, also featured in this very rich programme that constitutes an invitation to travel and reflection.

One of Deep Purple's four indispensable albums (the others being In Rock, Machine Head, and Burn), 1971's Fireball saw the band broadening out from the no-holds-barred hard rock direction of the previous year's cacophonous In Rock. Metal machine noises introduced the sizzling title track – an unusually compact but explosively tight group effort on which Jon Lord's organ truly shined…

Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left will be issued as a four-disc box set called The Making Of Five Leaves Left, in July. The album was released by Island Records in 1969 and was produced by Joe Boyd. The new box sets comes in 4CD and 4LP vinyl variants (identical tracklistings) and include unaccompanied demos, studio outtakes and previously unheard songs. There’s over 30 previously unheard outtakes, in total. The whole set has been mastered by John Wood.

The tragically short life of British folksinger Nick Drake left behind some of the most hauntingly beautiful music of its kind, with Drake's softly heartbroken voice guiding his songs to transcendent places over the course of just three classic, near-perfect studio albums. Virtually unknown during his life, Drake's songs have been perpetually reborn in the decades following his mysterious death in 1974. With each new generation that discovers or rediscovers his songs, there have been subsequent repackagings of his minute back catalog, and by the time of Tuckbox, one of several comprehensive discography compilations, the vaults have been combed pretty thoroughly for unreleased material to pad the studio albums. Tuckbox offers more of the same, its 71 tracks including the entirety of classic records Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon, as well as a bevy of tracks recorded before and after the periods that produced his studio work…

Released in 1994 and curated by Joe Boyd, the 16-track collection Way to Blue held true to its claim as An Introduction to Nick Drake. Though largely unknown during his lifetime and brief career, the beguiling English folksinger ascended to a kind of romantic cult hero in the two decades following his 1974 death. His name was known among artists and hardcore record collectors and thanks to Boyd's Hannibal Records label, his three lone albums along with the essential 1986 rarities disc Time of No Reply were all back in print. Artists like R.E.M., the Cure, and the Dream Academy had all cited him as an influence in the mid-'80s, but it really wasn't until the '90s that his gentle, austere music began to achieve the legendary status that it would enjoy well into the 21st century. A handful of other Nick Drake compilations had existed before this one, but Way to Blue remains the definitive primer for aspiring and casual fans.

One of Deep Purple's four indispensable albums (the others being In Rock, Machine Head, and Burn), 1971's Fireball saw the band broadening out from the no-holds-barred hard rock direction of the previous year's cacophonous In Rock…

In a second disc of Ives’s songs, the unbeatable partnership of Finley and Drake again enthral their listeners and bring them to the emotional core of each work. The range of style and approach in Ives’s text-setting is startling—from simple, sentimental ballads to complex and strenuous philosophical discourses, sometimes encompassing the most dissonant and virtuosic piano parts, sometimes with the accompaniment pared down to an almost minimalist phrase-repetition. Even those composed in a superficially conventional or ‘polite’ tonal idiom usually contain harmonic, rhythmic or accentual surprises somewhere.