Continuation of an extensive live retrospective from the archives of Anyone's Daughter. The CD offers songs from all creative periods of the band which, apart from one coincidence (an early version of 'Anyone's Daughter'), were not included on the first volume due to lack of space, for instance four tracks which cannot be found on any studio album: 'Schwärzer als die Nacht', a German language cover version of UK's classic 'In The Dead of Night', the instrumentals 'Stampede' and 'Pegasus', as well as an alternative version of 'Land's End', already included on the regular 'Live' album.
Volume Two of the Complete String Concertos of Ignace Pleyel (1757-1831) includes some charming, if undistinguished. music that sounds like Haydn with bits of Mozart mixed in. At one time among the most celebrated of Europe’s composers, Pleyel’s work has fallen into obscurity; so, we can be grateful that some talented instrumentalists are taking up his mantle again. A competent kapellmeister and more than competent master of diverse forms, Pleyel seems to employs the three-movement format for his Viotti-like concertos; the recording gives us the alternative ending, a 4/4 Rondo, to his violin concerto.
Joseph Haydn the composer of symphonies, string quartets, piano trios, piano sonatas, and a plethora of other instrumental works was also Joseph Haydn the composer, director, and producer of operas. His employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, greatly enjoyed opera, and for nearly 20 years Haydn's full-time job was running the theater at Esterháza, the Prince's pleasure palace in Hungary. In the first decade, Haydn wrote 10 operas for his company, the most successful of which ran for 20 performances. In tone, they range from the comic to the semi-serious to the wholly serious, and in quality, they range between the operas of Gluck and Mozart.
Barb Wired Tour Vol. 2 is the second of two volumes of Empress Valley’s ambitious nine disc compilation of important tapes from Ron Wood’s New Barbarians side project in support of his solo album Gimme Some Neck. Picking up where The Drug Dealer Tapes Vol. 1 (Empress Valley EVSD 196/200) leaves off, Vol. 2 contains four discs with another hour of the tour rehearsal tape along with two complete shows…
In the lineup of promising music geniuses whose lives were cut short, Norbert Burgmüller (1810-1836) is an imposing figure. During his lifetime, he made an impression on Mendelssohn and found an ardent champion in Schumann, who proclaimed "After Franz Schubert's early death, no other death could cause more grief than that of Burgmüller." He studied composition with Louis Spohr, who left a mark on the four string quartets. Three of them were completed while Burgmüller was still a student, but nothing in them suggests juvenilia. These are serious works steeped in a post-Beethoven outlook. While drawing upon Spohr's classicism and 'quatuor brillant' style, they look forward to early Romanticism and have lyrical qualities akin to Schubert.