James Rickards

The Sweethearts of the Rodeo are back! And their newest trick rider still has a lot to learn about competitive trick riding, and herself, too. COWGIRLS N ANGELS DAKOTAS SUMMER tells the story of Dakota, a cowgirl and trick rider who finds out at the age of 17 that she was adopted. While visiting her grandfather, rodeo legend Austin Rose, Dakota secretly sets out to discover the truth about her adoption and meet her birth parents.

This recording of Bach's great Mass in B Minor has none of the mannered control and deadening pace of other recordings I've heard. It is satisfyingly passionate and exuberant. The production is vibrant - turn up the volume – each voice and each instrument can be distinctly heard. The chorus pieces are startlingly clear. If you own only one copy of Mass in B Minor this is the one.

This is a most encouraging issue. In the wake of BIS’s continuing series of Mozart Camargo Guarnieri’s symphonies, Naxos – knowing a good thing when they hear it – have collected his three piano concertos onto a single disc, the First being a premiere recording with neither of the others otherwise available. Indeed, there is little enough of Guarnieri’s bright and attractive music in the catalogue at all. Recording the appealing First Concerto highlighted some major textual issues with the score, as James Melo succinctly summarizes in the booklet.