J F Holmes

Eat a Peach is a 1972 double album by American rock band the Allman Brothers Band, containing a mix of live and studio recordings. Following their artistic and commercial breakthrough with the release of the live album At Fillmore East (1971), the Allman Brothers Band got to work on their third studio album.

25 CD box set. Following the model of The Perfect Jazz Collection, this format comes in a cube lift off lid box, holding 25 original albums by 25 different artists. All original albums are replicated in mini jacket sleeves. This excellent value package, contains albums by legendary performers from the Blues genre ranging from 1951-2003; across some real classic albums, from Stevie Ray Vaughan, Aretha Franklin, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Taj Mahal, Etta James and many others.

Created in 1987, Naxos is the extraordinary story of a classic independent label born in… Hong Kong, first the first economic classical CD label, became in 30 years of hard work and talent of its founder Klaus Heymann, the first independent global classical label and the first independent distributor of classical music recorded worldwide through its subsidiary Naxos of America.

With this programme of music for cello and piano, Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih transport us to the world immortalized in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu – the Parisian high society and its glittering salons. For the composers of the time these provided a perfect platform for the introduction of new works, performed by the finest musicians in France for a sympathetic, educated and rich (!) audience. And for the music-loving Proust they offered countless opportunities to meet the composers that he so admired (and others that he may have admired a bit less…).The first of these to make his appearance in the programme is no one less than Proust’s one-time lover and lifelong friend, Reynaldo Hahn, with a brief set of Variations chantantes on a theme from a baroque opera. He is followed by Gabriel Fauré, whose music Proust gushed about in a letter to the composer: ‘I could write a book more than 300 pages long about it’. Proust was less expansive about Saint-Saëns’ music even if he admired him as a pianist, but the composer’s First Cello Sonata is nevertheless the centrepiece of the programme, before Henri Duparc and Augusta Holmès make their appearance. These were both students of César Franck, whose iconic Violin Sonata in A major (here in the version for cello) closes this programme of ‘salon music’ – in the best possible sense of the term.

20 CD Box Set. All Original Recordings from the 60s, 70s, 80s. Released by BMG in 1995.