Rupert Sheldrak

The new recording from EM Records features works by Edward Elgar, whose fiery and technically complex tudes caractristiques date from the early part of his career; and Donald Francis Tovey, who, in his emotionally wideranging Sonata eroica, pays homage to Bach. The disc also presents a selection of the Virtuosic Studies by Albert Sammons, the violinist who made benchmark recordings of Elgar's Violin Sonata and Concerto and who made a highly significant contribution to British violin-playing in the early years of the twentieth century. These are being recorded here for the first time.

No matter the lack of critical popular acclaim for director Akiva Goldsman's adaptation of Mark Helprin's novel Winter's Tale, the Hans Zimmer/ Rupert Gregson-Williams score is utterly worthy of the film, and also the novel itself. Full of classical and electronic textures, ambiences, and melodies that wed both the lyric themes of 19th century folk and classical music to the early 20th, these 14 cues are, by turns, delicate and dramatic, melancholy and romantic, spare and elegant. As a piece of music it stands on its own. The final track here is singer/songwriter K.T. Tunstall's "Miracle," written with A.R. Rahman specifically for the film. While it is dramatically different from the rest of the score, since it is the final track, it sums up the transcendent nature of the narrative.