Richard Hickox Haydn London Vol. 1

The Meistersaal Sessions are a 6-part series of chamber music theme concerts with the Freigeist Ensemble at the legendary Meistersaal Berlin, conducted by Joolz Gale. The series starts with arrangements of Schönberg, Strauss and Mahler. In collaboration with British photographer Gavin Evans, these club-concert sessions come live from the legendary Meistersaal Berlin, known historically as the “big hall by the Berlin Wall”. Its art-deco building is the current home of Emil Berliner Studios (audio partner for this project) and steeped in many decades of musical history.

The Meistersaal Sessions are a 6-part series of chamber music theme concerts with the Freigeist Ensemble at the legendary Meistersaal Berlin, conducted by Joolz Gale. The series starts with arrangements of Schönberg, Strauss and Mahler. In collaboration with British photographer Gavin Evans, these club-concert sessions come live from the legendary Meistersaal Berlin, known historically as the “big hall by the Berlin Wall”. Its art-deco building is the current home of Emil Berliner Studios (audio partner for this project) and steeped in many decades of musical history.

This outstanding release is first to couple music by the sister and wife of two great Romantics – incredibly gifted women who were also fine composers, whose music has remained little-known for almost 175 years.

This Japanese collection features mostly early Cliff Richard hits, beginning with his first, "Move It," which was released in 1958, through his so-called comeback years in the late 1970s, including his only U.S. hit, 1976's "Devil Woman."

This Japanese collection features mostly early Cliff Richard hits, beginning with his first, "Move It," which was released in 1958, through his so-called comeback years in the late 1970s, including his only U.S. hit, 1976's "Devil Woman."

The first volume of Tempesta di Mare's series on Chandos, Comédie et Tragédie, offers period-style performances of orchestral music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Féry Rebel, and Marin Marais. The orchestral suites drawn from Lully's music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Rebel's symphonie nouvelle Les élémens, and Marais' suite from the tragédie en musique Alcyone give a taste of theater music in the court of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and these pieces show how inventive composers were with instrumentation and their combinations of dances with dramatic scene painting. Tempesta di Mare, which is also known as the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, gives bright and energetic performances, and the musicians have a fine sense of the swung rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lively ornamentation in French Baroque music. The recording is clear and well-balanced, though the percussion in Lully's March for the Turkish Ceremony (track 4) is a bit startling, and the dissonant opening of Rebel's Le Chaos (track 13) has its own shock value. Highly recommended.

The Grammy-Award-winning Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is without doubt one of American music’s leading orchestral composers. His orchestral output has grown and developed to encompass a wide range of genres, from overtures and tone poems to suites and concertos (ten to date, including ones for string quartet, electric guitar, and piano, the last entitled Spiritualist), inspired by a diverse range of subjects, testimony to his wide sympathies and fields of knowledge.

Britain has a fine tradition in the creation of quality light music of the sort that plumbs no intellectual or emotional stimulation, but lifts the spirits with ingratiating melodies decked out with consummate craftsmanship. In this collection are gathered some of the classics that the genre has produced over a period from Victorian times to the second Elizabethan age.

In recent years London has become an epicenter for experimental, visionary jazz. On this unique session, two of the finest exponents of the London jazz scene, Tamar Osborn and Al MacSween, join forces with members of the celebrated Danish psychedelic underground – Jonas Munk, Jakob Skøtt and Martin Rude – to create a heady sonic brew. On this first volume of material there’s everything one could hope for in such a collaboration: sonically it summons the free flowing euphoria of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders’ work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But there’s also a focus on rhythmic energy and vitality that calls to mind the grooviest krautrock or electric period Miles Davis, as well as a healthy dose of electronic experiments.