Peter's Deal Friends (2021)

Reissue of the 1986 debut album by this cult English alternative rock group signed to Beggar's Banquet (issued on the I.R.S. label in the U.S. at the time). Out of print for years, this album has been highly sought after by fans & collectors. This is the U.K. edition, which contains nine of the cuts found on the deleted American CD, plus two left off of it, 'Waspy' & 'A Funny Thing…'.

There's a bittersweet beauty to the passing of time – the changes it brings are just as often heartbreaking as they are heartwarming. The inevitable tension that arises from that sway is Gretchen Peters' most trusted muse. “The years go by like days. Sometimes the days go by like years. And I don't know which one I hate the most,” she sings in “Arguing with Ghosts,” the hauntingly wistful opening cut on her new album, Dancing with the Beast.

L’amor conjugale tells the same story as Beethoven’s Fidelio, but in a charmingly different adaptation of the original French text by the Italian librettist Gaetano Rossi. In Giovanni Simone Mayr’s hand, the conjugal love is not just between the two principal characters Amorveno and Zeliska, but also between two theatrical and musical traditions, a love affair between two styles developed north and south of the alps. While the orchestration is clearly influenced by Mozart and Haydn, the vocal writing is often purely bel canto, and this blending of styles is one of the most attractive and unique attributes of the opera.

A daring wife disguises herself in order to be hired as a prison guard and thus rescue her unjustly detained husband: the story of Leonora, taken from the French novel by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, is familiar to us through Beethoven’s only opera.