Shares From 17 September 2015

Sandwiched between 1984's Top 20 hit Breaking Hearts and 1986's commercial disaster Leather Jackets, 1985's Ice on Fire is a forgotten Elton John effort. While it is hardly a masterpiece – it isn't even up to the standard of such '80s efforts as Too Low for Zero – it's still an enjoyable record, living proof of the power of professionalism…

The protean and prolific Jeroen van Veen turns his attention to Erik Satie’s complete piano works for a 9-CD boxed set that ties in with the composer’s 150th birthday year. In a way, the collection is completer than complete. It includes all of Satie’s published and unpublished works for solo piano and piano duo, piano arrangements of theater scores as Le fils des étoiles, Darius Milhaud’s transcription of Cinéma.

In 2016 The Winstons' debut album came like a bolt from the blue in the Italian rock scene, and almost made a miracle in binding together two worlds often considered poles apart: indie and progressive rock; the mix of Canterbury sounds (Soft Machine in the first place) and psychedelia (The Doors and The Beatles above all) offered by this new trio turned out to be really peculiar and original. But even before their eponymous record came out, The Winstons had already played live in November 2015 their own personal reinterpretation of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". Today, that effort is finally put on record, thus renewing the partnership between AMS Records and the trio consisting of Enrico Gabrielli (keyboards, wind instruments), Roberto Dell'Era (bass, vocals) and Lino Gitto (drums, vocals)…

Joseph Suk's Ripening is one of the most amazing of all post-Romantic orchestral works. It is immensely complex in its structure: a celestial introduction is followed by a cogent progress of scherzos and slow movements, of funeral marches and fugues, all concluded by a serene coda. Yet the work is immediately comprehensible as a musical drama, made clear through the coherence of the thematic and harmonic material. Pesek and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic perform like modern-day deities. They fall short of the heights of Talich and the Czech Philharmonic, but Talich gave the work its premiere. Nonetheless, Pesek gives Ripening his very considerable all: his concentration holds the gigantic structure together as a single arch. Plus, his players articulate every instrumental detail, right down to the beatific wordless women's choir at the work's close. Highly recommended.

A panoramic "wide screen" music, as cinema fans might say, and which sounds like the missing link between the grandeur of Richard Warner and the orchestral work of someone like Nick Cave.
This is the ambition underlying Rite of the End by the Polish composer Stefan Wesołowski, the second album to be released at Ici d'ailleurs after Kompleta in 2015.