Flaxy Martin (1949)

Enjoying great success in music, film, television, and the stage, Dean Martin was less an entertainer than an icon, the eternal essence of cool. A member of the legendary Rat Pack, he lived and died the high life of booze, broads and bright lights, always projecting a sense of utter detachment and serenity; along with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. and the other chosen few who breathed the same rarefied air, Martin – highball and cigarette always firmly in hand – embodied the glorious excess of a world long gone, a world without rules or consequences.

The young Swiss cellist Christian Poltéra released three remarkable discs of Swiss modernist music in 2007. First came Othmar Schoeck's concerto and sonata for cello plus four song transcriptions for cello and piano. Then came Arthur Honegger's concerto and sonata for cello plus two sonatines. And last there was this one, Frank Martin's concerto and ballade for cello and 8 Preludes for orchestra.

Martin Barre is an English rock musician best known for his work with progressive rock band Jethro Tull, with whom he recorded and toured from their second album in 1969 to the band's initial dissolution in 2012. In the early 1990s he went solo, and has recorded four studio albums and made several guest appearances.

Fearsomely talented Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst continues his conquest of the major concerto repertoire for his instrument with this recording of Carl Nielsen's 1928 Clarinet Concerto, paired with a new concerto by Finland's Kalevi Aho. The Nielsen concerto is a dense work in which the clarinet and the orchestra spend a lot of time going their separate ways, with the path of the clarinet being very twisted indeed. Difficult arabesques on the clarinet are interrupted without warning by heraldic blasts from the orchestral horns. The concerto was greeted by early reviewers as a radical modern work, and an instrumentalist wanting to push the clarinet into uncomfortable territory can still make it sound that way.