Paul Stewart

Medtner’s 14 piano sonatas, the most significant achievement in this genre by any major composer since Beethoven, span his career. The Sonata-Ballade explores a tempestuous musical allegory – the triumph of Light over Darkness, of Faith over Doubt; while the Sonata in A minor is cast in a single, terse movement, with folkloric elements and frequent use of bell-like features that exude Russianness. By contrast, the ‘Night Wind’ Sonata is a monumental epic of exceptional complexity that stunned Rachmaninov and led composer and critic Sorabji to call it ‘the greatest piano sonata of modern times.’

Sir James Paul McCartney, CH, MBE (born 18 June 1942), is an English singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. He gained worldwide fame as the bass guitarist and singer for the rock band the Beatles, widely considered the most popular and influential group in the history of pop music. His songwriting partnership with John Lennon was the most successful of the post-war era…

Once he became a superstar, Rod Stewart essentially gave up on songwriting because, let's face it, it's easier to play endless football and cavort with models. Every once in a while his muse returned, so he tried a little bit harder, such as in 1988 when he spun Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" into a song of his own, which wound up as the last hit single of his that he ever wrote…

The five albums collected in this 2010 slipcase box – Foolish Behaviour, Tonight I'm Yours, Camouflage, Every Beat of My Heart, and Vagabond Heart – may not be Rod Stewart's best, but they are certainly the ones that capture the singer's '80s work…

Touted as a personally curated compilation by Paul McCartney, Pure McCartney is the first McCartney compilation since 2001's Wingspan: Hits and History. A full 15 years separated this and Wingspan, longer than the span between that double-disc set and 1987's All the Best, but the 2001 set also stopped cold in 1984, leaving over 30 years of solo McCartney recordings uncompiled on hits collections. In both its standard two-CD and deluxe four-disc incarnations, Pure McCartney attempts to rectify this, going so far as to include "Hope for the Future," his song for the 2014 video game Destiny.

Smiler is Rod Stewart's sixth album, fifth solo album and final album for Mercury Records, released in 1974. It became the first album by Rod Stewart as a solo artist to become critically panned. Although it reached number 1 in the UK album chart, it stalled at number 13 in the US. The album was largely considered to be an unadventurous retread of what he had done before, including covers of Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan songs, as well as a duet with Elton John of John's song "Let Me Be Your Car"…

Throughout his career, Rod Stewart has been remarkably skillful at adopting current musical trends, whether it was disco, new wave, adult contemporary, or even Brit-pop. Still, his records started to slip off the radar screen toward the end of the '90s, so he parted ways with Warner Bros. and signed to Atlantic, where he released Human in early 2001…