Requiem Pro Panenku Requiem For a Maiden (1992)

Peter Schreier brought a lifetime's experience as a singer to the conductor's rostrum in his accounts of Mozart's Requiem, Coronation Mass, and motet Ave verum Corpus. The performances were recorded in Dresden between 1982 and 1992. A major plus is highly disciplined singing by the Leipzig Radio Chorus, whose clarity of diction and finely balanced ensemble adds much to your enjoyment of these performances; they're heard on their own account in the motet that concludes this reissue. The Requiem (in Süssmayr's completion) is powerfully and urgently driven.

Barclay James Harvest was, for many years, one of the most hard luck outfits in progressive rock. A quartet of solid rock musicians – John Lees, guitar, vocals; Les Holroyd, bass, vocals; Stuart "Wooly" Wolstenholme, keyboards, vocals; and Mel Pritchard, drums – with a knack for writing hook-laden songs built on pretty melodies, they harmonized like the Beatles and wrote extended songs with more of a beat than the Moody Blues…

Antonín Rejcha (1770, Prague - 1836 Paris) was a respected professor of counterpoint and fugal technique at Paris Conservatory, and an author of pedagogical works which even Bedřich Smetana and Fryderyk Chopin studied. He wrote wind quintets, piano fugues, overtures and symphonies. It wasn't until the late 20th century that the discovery of his manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris revealed that he was also a composer of large works for choir and orchestra. One such discovery was Rejchas's Missa pro defunctis - Requiem, written in Vienna, where Rejcha lived from 1802 to 1808 before settling down in Paris.