Roger Hiemstra

'The Lockdown Sessions' was recorded at home during the Covid lockdown between 2020 and 2021. Also included is 'Comfortably Numb 2022' which was recorded during Waters' This Is Not A Drill North American tour. The collection includes five seminal tracks from across Roger Waters' time with Pink Floyd and his solo career; 'Mother' and 'Vera' from Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'; 'Two Suns in the Sunset' and 'The Gunner's Dream' from Waters' final Pink Floyd album, 'The Final Cut'; and 'The Bravery of Being Out of Range' from his highly acclaimed solo album, 'Amused to Death'. Waters' new version of the classic Pink Floyd song 'Comfortably Numb' features as the final track.

What a versatile artist Steven Isserlis is. Having made his name as a sympathetic interpreter of a wide variety of romantic and modern music, here he shows he can be just as persuasive in eighteenth-century repertoire. His stylistic awareness is evident in beautiful, elegant phrasing, selective use of vibrato and varied articulation, giving an expressive range that never conflicts with the music’s natural language. In the cello concertos he is helped by an extremely sensitive accompaniment, stressing the chamber musical aspects of Haydn’s pre-London orchestral writing. The soft, intimate sonority at 3'06'' in the first movement of the D major is a typical example. The Adagios are taken at a flowing speed, but Isserlis’s relaxed approach means they never sound hurried. The Allegro molto finale of the C major Concerto, on the other hand, sounds poised rather than the helter-skelter we often hear. In his understanding of the music, Isserlis is a long way ahead of Han-na Chang, whose version places the emphasis on fine, traditional-style cello playing. Mork’s vivacious, imaginative performances characterize the music very strongly, but my preference would be for Isserlis’s and Norrington’s lighter touch and greater refinement.

Outsider is Queen drummer Roger Taylor’s sixth solo album, and the first one he’s really got right…

Roger Waters is Pink Floyd's grand conceptualist, the driving force behind such albums as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall. In the wake of Syd Barrett's departure, Waters emerged as a formidable songwriter, but it's this stretch of '70s albums – each one nearly symphonic in its reach – that established him as a distinctive, idiosyncratic voice within rock and, following his departure from Floyd in 1985, he continued to create new works in this vein (notably, 1992's Amused to Death) and capitalized on the enduring popularity of his old band by staging live revivals of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall in their entireties.