Jassy (1947) Bernard Knowles, Margaret Lockwood, Patricia Roc, Dennis Price

This is an enchanting CD, every item a sheer delight. Margaret Leng Tan worked with Cage in the last decade of his life and her earlier recordings (1/92; 7/95) show a special sympathy for the magical world of Cage's keyboard music. The second of her New Albion CDs included the piano solo version of The Seasons, and Cage was honest enough to admit to her that he had help from Virgil Thomson and Lou Harrison in making the orchestral version recorded here. The result is recognisably Cage at his most poetic, evoking each of the four seasons in lovely changing colours. There are two realisations of one of the last of what are called Cage's 'Number Pieces', Seventy-Four, written specially for the American Composers Orchestra a few months before his death in 1992. Several hearings have confirmed for me that this seamless garment of sustained sound in two overlapping parts is an immensely moving document from a unique human being at the very end of his life.

If one considers that this 2005 CD presents music written in the early to middle twentieth century, and the latest of these is a "recomposition" of three Renaissance madrigals, then it seems a most peculiar offering in ECM's New Series line – certainly important for anyone interested in modern music but decidedly not the cutting-edge fare this label usually delivers.

This 2-disc release of Herrmann's first score for Harryhausen is a lavish delight. Firstly, both discs are presented in full stereophonic sound - the full-bodied monaural descriptor being entirely wrong for the disc-1 complete score. This presentation utilizes the same remastered music stems that the Sony blu-ray disc offers, and is sonically splendid. The second disc is the original soundtrack album re-recording, all stereo except one track, and it's the familiar version that's been a collector's item for many years. The soundtrack album was conducted by Muir Mathieson, and contrary to Herrmann's opinion of it, it's a robust presentation of the original score. A masterpiece, right up there with the likes of Moross' THE BIG COUNTRY, North's SPARTACUS, Rosza's EL CID, and Jarre's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Mendelssohn's songs with words are bound to invite comparison with his Songs Without. Those 48 elegant piano pieces have often been viewed as being a little lacking in variety and as being a walk on the mild side. This disc contains 24 songs carolled by Margaret Price to a tasteful accompaniment from Graham Johnson. The performers take us back to the familiar world of the Lieder Ohne Worte, and rightly so. The songs range from the composer's teens to late in his brief career, and to my ears the numbers selected improve in general as they go along, and the performances improve along with them.

Au moment de cet enregistrement, au début des années quatre-vingt, Sir Georg Solti était encore tout auréolé du prestige d'une précédente interprétation du Bal masqué réalisée en 33 tours. Plus encore que dans la première mouture, le chef d'origine hongroise exacerbe ici la violence du drame, poussant tous les personnages vers leur destin, dans un souffle épique d'une rare intensité. Une distribution quasiment idéale fait face au chef : un Pavarotti de la grande époque, un Bruson idiomatique et une Christa Ludwig d'une ardeur insoupçonnée.

With her new programme "L'amour, la mort, la mer" Patricia Petibon flies freely from one register to another, from one language to another, and from one style to its exact opposite. However, she does base her repertoire around her own personal journey. This is what grants her seemingly eclectic style the consistency of an unparalleled performance. It is less a recital than a story that unfolds from one composer to the next—a secret story of grief, travel, and solitude. In this way, she echoes the idea underpinning Saint- John Perse’s poem, Amers: “The tragedians came down from the quarries.