Label: Warner

By the time he made these celebrated recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra in the early 1960s, Otto Klemperer was a grand old man of conducting. Christa Ludwig, by contrast, was in the glowing early prime of her extraordinary career, which encompassed repertoire for both mezzo-soprano and soprano. “Klemperer was marvellous for the singing,” she later said, “because he did nothing against the composer.” This collection shows the fruits of their collaboration in Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms and Mahler.

As a matter of fact, this is your parents' Schubert lieder recital. Back in the '60s, when you were up in your bedroom listening the Beatles on your portable record player, your mom and dad were downstairs listening to Christa Ludwig on the console housed in the hutch. And while they wished you'd turn your music down, you wished they'd turn down their music down.

With his voice in its heady first bloom, Fischer-Dieskau dramatises rather than merely relates. In the third song, "Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen", he is dulcet at the opening, finds a disembodied colouring for the mysterious birdsong, and then uses a harder, darkened tone to convey the mingled disillusion and defiance of the close. Elsewhere, Fischer-Dieskau combines a yearning legato with an edge of neurosis in "Schöne Wiegen meiner Leiden", hauntingly catches the numbed fear of "Lieb' Liebchen" - where Heine equates his heartbeat with a carpenter hammering his coffin - and sings the final "Mit Myrthen und Rosen" with rueful tenderness.

Released in 2001, There You'll Be: The Best of Faith Hill was a collection designed for international markets, intending to introduce the American superstar to the world. As such, it presents her as a pop star, including remixes of "Breathe" and "The Way You Love Me" (that are nevertheless also present in their original versions), as well as her biggest crossover hits from Breathe, Faith, and It Matters to Me.

Her story is one of the most legendary of all twentieth century musicians' stories, and also, one of the most tragic. Cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, born on January 26, 1945, in Oxford, England, to Derek and Iris Du Pré. (Despite the family name, Derek Du Pré was not French, but rather of British Channel Island ancestry; he could trace his lineage back to the Norman Conquest).