Roger Hiemstra

This CD presents the brief but remarkable output of songs by Duparc during his artistic period that was cut short by a nervous affliction. These works are beautifully performed by mezzo-soprano Sarah Walker and baritone Thomas Allen, with sensitive piano accompaniment by Roger Vignoles. The collection opens with Duparc's best known melody, L'invitation au voyage, which is a setting of a text from Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal. The lovely rolling impressionist piano harmonies are played with exquisite fluidity, as they underscore Walker's velvety and intimate vocals. The Sérénade florentine is an impressionist lullaby to a loved one, delivered with touching emotion by Thomas Allen. Extase, Elégie and Testament show the influence of Wagner, and the Chanson triste is one of Duparc's early, Gounod-style songs. Au pays oú se fait la guerre (1869) is also an early work, but is particularly entrancing with simple modal harmonies and easily perceived song construction. By sensitive use of passing tones in the piano, the harmonies are subtly redefined and the music is extended dramatically toward the end by expressive on-rushes.

The first-ever single-disc anthology of Queen drummer Roger Taylor's solo material, 2014's Best brings together tracks off all five of his studio albums. The collection follows-up the more exhaustive 2013 box-set, The Lot, and features cuts from 1981's Fun in Space, 1984's Strange Frontier, 1994's Happiness?, 1998's Electric Fire, and 2013's Fun on Earth. While primarily known for his commanding drum presence with Queen, Taylor is also a strong rock singer and talented songwriter, responsible for penning such Queen hits as "Radio Ga Ga," "Breakthru," "These Are the Days of Our Lives," and others. Vocally, Taylor has a throatier, more gravelly presence on the microphone than Queen's highly resonant, operatic frontman Freddie Mercury. In that sense, he often brings to mind the sound of such similarly inclined contemporaries as the Who's Roger Daltrey, Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter, and Deep Purple's Ian Gillan. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the cuts here sound like they could easily have ended up on a Queen album, and tracks like "Let’s Get Crazy," "Man on Fire," and "Strange Frontier" showcase the same synth-driven, pop/rock approach Queen was championing in the '80s.

Roger Waters may not have made an album of new material between 1992 and 2017, but he was very active during that quarter-century. He toured regularly, wrote an opera, reunited Pink Floyd for the 2005 charity concert Live 8, and revived The Wall several times, turning the self-absorbed rock opera into a political piece. Is This the Life We Really Want?, his fourth song cycle, picks up on this thread, functioning as barbed protest music for the age of Brexit and Trump. Waters doesn't disguise his bile – there's a lament for "The Last Refugee" and he spits out "picture a leader with no f****** brains," a clear broadside against Trump – but the album doesn't seethe with rage. With its deliberate tempos, wide soundscapes, operatic guitar solos, and swelling crescendos, it is recognizably a Waters album or, perhaps more accurately, a Floydian one.

The late Romanticism of Roger Sacheverell Coke will appeal to anyone who enjoys Rachmaninov or Delius, Grainger or Scriabin. If that sounds an intriguingly eclectic mix, Coke establishes his own distinctive voice, and this is an important addition to the Romantic Piano Concerto series.

London Free Improv Scene long-standing members, vocalist Phil Minton and drummer/percussionist Roger Turner's first album together, "Ammo", was released in 1984; the two have continued to record together, and this live recording from 2016 in Hanover, Germany shows the two continuing to create distinctly bizarre and wonderfully personal dialog unlike any other.

War is Roger Waters' great muse, the impetus for so much of his work, including the semi-autobiographical 1979 opus The Wall. The Final Cut, his last album with Pink Floyd, functioned as an explicit sequel to The Wall, but 1992's Amused to Death acts as something of a coda, a work where Waters revisits his obsessions – both musical and lyrical – and ties them together with the masterful touch of a mature artist…

Nobody really expected the Berlin Wall to come down in 1989, and so suddenly. Roger Waters especially, because he had once made a promise never to perform The Wall again after the 1980 tour until the bricks fell in Berlin. But they did, and Waters had no intention to renege on his promise. The Wall became a star-studded megaconcert to benefit the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, with larger bricks, bigger inflatable puppets, and a larger audience than any of the original Pink Floyd shows. There was always a contradiction in performing such a personal work in a stadium setting, but here it becomes especially acute when opening up the vocal tasks to a variety of artists.

The singer with the wildcat voice, once a front man for Family and Streetwalkers, breaks out here with his first solo effort. With band politics out of the way, Chapman garners all the spotlight for himself while backed by an ensemble of friends. Although he keeps rock guitar close to him, Chapman abandons Streetwalkers' hard rock sound for a more varied style, including multiple keyboards and female backing vocals, and it's probably more a sign of producer David Courtney's influence (having previously worked with Leo Sayer). Singing cry-in-yer-ale ballads and tight rock songs, Chapman lays out the stylistic blueprint to which he keeps returning, even 20 years later. While Chapman's music was more embellished than before, most fans found that "the voice" still spoke to them.