Festival Website

Les Noces is a screaming, shrieking, flat-out masterpiece. Leonard Bernstein himself has referred to it as Stravinsky's greatest work, and listening to this incendiary performance, it's awfully hard to disagree. Scored for voices, four pianos, and percussion, the work provided the inspiration for the entire career of Orff (of Carmina Burana fame), but it's so much better as sheer music than anything Orff wrote. And what a cast! The pianists for this performance include Martha Argerich, Krystian Zimerman, Cyprien Katsaris, and Homero Francesch, four certified virtuoso performers, while the singers of the English Bach Festival Chorus really cover themselves with glory in both works. A stunner.

Paul Weller didn't play many dates in support of his 2018 album True Meanings. Not counting his summer festival appearances, which were all delivered prior to the album's September release, he gave just five concerts: two in the Netherlands, one in Belgium, and a two-night stand at London's Royal Festival Hall in October, where he played with the support of a full orchestra. Those two dates are the basis of Other Aspects: Live at the Royal Albert Hall, a double-CD accompanied by a DVD. Weller deliberately avoided familiar material for these concerts. All of True Meanings save three songs is performed (the mid-album sequence of "Bowie," "Wishing Well," and "Come Along" is absent) and he eschews crowd-pleasers from both his solo career and the Jam in favor of moody, lush reworkings of "Tales from the Riverbank" and "Private Hell."

Orchestral and choral arrangements of rock songs have been a curious subgenre ever since the mid-'60s when Andrew Loog Oldham arranged The Rolling Stones Songbook for syrupy strings, but The Kinks Choral Collection stands apart from the pack for the simple reason that it's not the project of some associate or admirer, but rather chief Kink Ray Davies. His very presence as arranger and lead vocal means The Kinks Choral Collection isn't nearly as stuffy and middlebrow as so many of these orchestral rock albums; he manages to inject some semblance of rock & roll by pushing the songs forward with guitar, and letting the rhythms swing instead of plod.

Jimi Plays Monterey is a posthumous live album by Jimi Hendrix. The album documents The Jimi Hendrix Experience's performance at the Monterey Pop Festival on June 18, 1967. As well as songs from the band's debut album Are You Experienced, Monterey also includes covers of "Killing Floor" (Howlin' Wolf), "Like a Rolling Stone" (Bob Dylan), "Rock Me Baby" (B. B. King) and "Wild Thing" (Chip Taylor). The version of "Wild Thing" on the album is one of the most notable live performances ever, as, in an iconic moment in rock history, he sets his guitar alight after the song and then smashes it.