Esoteric Recordings releases of a newly remastered 5CD clamshell boxed set comprising the two original ‘Archive Collection’ albums by celebrated composer and Genesis founder member Anthony Phillips. Aside from his work as a solo artist, Anthony has been a composer of music for television for many years, going back as far as 1976 and those compositions form the backbone of these collections.
Rarities Volume I & Volume II is a two-album series collecting songs by The Who, released in 1983 on Polydor in the United Kingdom. The very first release in this series was a single LP titled Join Together - Rarities issued by Polydor in Australia and New Zealand in 1982. It had the same contents as the later released Rarities Volume II with the exception of a shorter version of "I Don't Even Know Myself". The short version of this song fades out about twenty seconds early instead of having a full ending.
In February 1954, as part of a promotional campaign, DG produced a now legendary 10-inch LP titled Musik … Sprache der Welt (Music - the Universal Language), that presented selections of its then current recordings. That LP, now a rare collector's item, consisted of extracts of works by the great composers.Each selection had a brief spoken introduction and was intended as a marketing tool for salesmen, to give - as Deutsche Grammophon wrote - "An impression of the breath and quality of our repertoire, a kind of calendar in sound". By reviving the title…. they developed this series to re-create the flavour and the spirit of those times. This 10-CD set of chronologically-ordered orchestral works - from Haydn to Bruckner - features familiar iconic recordings.
Igbó Alákọrin (a phrase in Yoruba which can be loosely translated as The Singer’s Grove) is the realization of pianist David Virelles’s long-held dream to document the under-sung musicians of his birthplace, Santiago de Cuba. Virelles, who was named the #1 Rising Jazz Pianist in the 2017 Downbeat Critics Poll, is one of the most in-demand pianists on the contemporary jazz scene, recording with the likes of Henry Threadgill, Chris Potter, and Tomasz Stanko. He also has four prior releases under his own name, including Continuum, which topped the New York Times best album list for 2012.
At the risk of getting doxxed by my musician colleagues, I'm going to divulge a dark truth about classical music: it's never as captivating or molecule-altering for anyone as it is for us on stage. Which is why I often find classical records, especially those of the orchestral persuasion, so underwhelming.
"Having listened for over half a century to tens of thousands of recordings of Mozart’s music, be it piano music, string quartets, symphonies, operas, et al, I have been hugely energised by these recordings, not because they are so great, but because they are so terrible!"